In November 2010, Dr. Frank Schneider, president of the German Association of Psychiatrists issued a public apology for psychiatry’s creation of the ideology that developed Nazi euthanasia and their role in the selection of those to be murdered as well as murdering others themselves.

German psychiatrists created the “racial hygiene” movement, which began with the work of eugenicist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. The idea stemmed from English psychologist Francis Galton who in 1883 coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as “the science of improving the stock.”

Almost 40 years after Ploetz wrote The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, his theories gained supremacy with the passage of the 1933 Sterilization Act in Nazi Germany and the concept of “lives unworthy of living.” This led to psychiatrists in Germany murdering tens of thousands of people that were “racially or mentally unfit,” long before the Holocaust began, and these same psychiatrists helped establish the killing centers during the Holocaust. Millions of people were killed during the Holocaust in Germany.

Below is a chronology of these events caused by German psychiatrists:

English biologist Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, which supported the idea that some genetic differences in animals were superior to others and was a watershed in scientific racism.

Wilhem Wundt, German psychologist, started the theory that man was no more than an animal that could be shaped like a stimulus-response mechanism and did not have a soul. His theory was broadly taught throughout the world.

English psychologist Francis Galton, half-cousin of Darwin, coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as “the science of improving the stock.”

German eugenicst Alfred Ploetz wrote The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, which discouraged medical care to the “weak.” He called his new philosophy Rassenhygiene (Racial Hygiene).

The Race Betterment Foundation was founded in the U.S. to help stop the propagation of defectives.

Alfred Ploetz founded the Archive for Racial and Social Biology, which proposed population control through the regulation of the reproductive activity of the German people by getting rid of those “undesirables”. In later years, the Nazi regime would credit Ploetz and his colleagues with having helped provide the “biological foundations” for the Nazi racial state.

On January 19, U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport, a Professor of Biology and Galton follower helped establish the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, using funds from wealthy industrialist and eugenicist Andrew Carnegie. Davenport calculated that supporting the insane and other misfits costs taxpayers more than $100 million a year and suggested that they be castrated. One of Davenport's earliest German allies was eugenicist Eugen Fischer, co-author of the 1921 German book on eugenics, which influenced Hitler. Davenport and Fischer exchanged research.

Ploetz, together with his psychiatrist brother-in-law Ernst Rüdin and others founded the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene). Rudin later was the impetus behind the Nazi Party and the “racial cleansing” which led to the Holocaust. In 1905 there were 32 members of the society; by 1907, it had reached 100 and changed its name to the International Society for Racial Hygiene.

The state of Indiana in the U.S. passed the first sterilization law, influenced by eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, an American who helped start the Eugenics movement in the U.S.

The drumbeat of eugenical thinking began to permeate to the highest levels of German society. Racial hygiene had received recognition from the German government prior to World War I, when in 1910, the Reich Health Office began to assemble a file on Rassenhygiene, including materials on population policy, birth control, anthropology, and papers on differences between Germans and Jews.

Charles Davenport’s Eugenics Records Office was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, headed by Harry Laughlin, expanding the eugenics movement into the United States. Its first mission was to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, estimated to be at least 10 percent of the population—at the time amounting to millions of Americans.

German psychiatrist Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen (who obtained his medical degree at Leipzig University in 1905) was employed in New Jersey as chief eugenic legal adviser. He helped draft the “law for sterilization of epileptics, criminals and incurably insane” for the Governor of New Jersey. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a Harvard lecturer in abnormal psychology, but returned to Germany in 1915 and was eventually prosecuted by the Nuremberg Trials right along with the other so-called "butchers of Buchenwald." He was sentenced to life in prison. He once wrote: “It has been a hard battle, which in forty years time has elevated psychology from a Cinderella science domiciled in one room at the Leipzig University to palace-like institutions, such as for instance the Harvard Psychological Institute....”

The First International Congress of Eugenics in London was held, with Alfred Ploetz, “the spiritual father of Germany’s race hygiene and eugenics movement” and Charles Davenport appointed among the vice presidents. He was one of about 15 individuals invited back to Paris the following year to create the Permanent International Eugenics Committee. The Congress attracted several hundred delegates and speakers from the U.S., Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Norway.

An Iowa, U.S. bill said that those in need of sterilization included "criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons."

Ernst Rüdin was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry, where he wrote a study on the genetic inheritability of schizophrenia and began a campaign to purge Germany of its “unfit stock.” Articles by and about him ran in the national U.S. eugenic press for years. In May 1922, the Journal of Heredity published a discussion by Rüdin on the inheritance of mental defects. In September 1924, Eugenical News published a report, asserting that Rüdin’s studies of the "inheritance of mental disorders are the most thorough that are being undertaken anywhere. It is hoped that they will be long continued and expanded." A 1925 Eugenical News article praised Rüdin, "whose dynamic personality infuses itself throughout the entire establishment." Later, the Journal of the American Medical Association also published a long report about his work on heredity and mental disease.

Psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, Chief Justice of the Reich, wrote The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Living, stating that:

1. The suffering of a sick or wounded person who is about to die can be shortened through the use of a medical drug.

2. This acceleration of the death process is not an act of murder but "in truth a pure act of healing." (This justification was later used specifically by the Nazis in defense of their extermination programs).

3. A doctor should be able to employ euthanasia on any unconscious person without legal consequences.

The second International Congress of Eugenics was held in New York. The sponsoring committee included U.S. Secretary of Commerce and future President Herbert Hoover.

Erwin Bauer, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz wrote Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene (Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene). Lenz’s words convey the attitude that paved the way for Hitler: “I have heard that Hitler had read the second edition of Bauer-Fischer-Lenz during his incarceration in Landsberg. Some parts of it are mirrored in Hitler's phrases. In any case, with great mental energy, he had made the basic ideas of racial hygiene and their importance his own, while most of the academic authorities still look upon these issues rather unappreciatively.” In the U.S., the Journal of Hereditary described the book as “encyclopedic” and “worthy of the best traditions in German scholarship.” In 1929, this same journal hailed the book as “the standard textbook of human genetics,” not only in Germany but in the rest of the world.

Lenz was named Germany’s first professor of racial hygiene at the University of Munich. Lenz had met Alfred Ploetz in 1909 and decided then to devote his life to this new eugenics “science.”

Dr. Gustav Boeters, one of Germany’s most persistent advocates of sterilization, defended the sterilization of “mental inferiors” with the following argument: “What we racial hygienists promote is by no means new or unheard of. In a cultured nation of the first order—the United States of America—that which we strive toward [that is, sterilization legislation] was introduced and tested long ago.”

Hitler threw his support behind the eugenics movement. “He who is not healthy and worthy bodily or mentally is not allowed to perpetuate his malady in the body of his child….,” he wrote, advocating the sterilization of defectives. But even then, Hitler did not yet endorse their killing, as did psychiatrists such as Alfred Hoche.

The Rockefeller Foundation gave $2.5 million to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich, which quickly became Germany's leading center for eugenics research. In addition, it provided funds to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin, which was used to pay for a national survey of “degenerative traits” in the German population.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, opened its doors in Berlin-Dahlem, headed by Eugen Fischer (and replaced by Ernst Rüdin in 1933.) Between 1933 and 1936, records of the institute’s activities revealed a wide range of eugenics experiments.

Rüdin was the host when International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO) members, met in Munich and treated to a guided tour of Rüdin's department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The next year, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry was selected for IFEO membership.

On September 27, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations met in Rome to consider the preliminary report of the Committee on Race Crossing. Eugen Fischer and Davenport wanted to enlist dictator Mussolini to help impose stern eugenic measures in Italy. On December 2, Davenport wrote to Fischer in Munich asking him to assume chairmanship of the Committee on Race Crossing, adding, "Personally, I am very glad that the Federation is now under the Leitung [leadership] of a German." Davenport and Fischer coauthored a questionnaire to be sent worldwide asking for racial data." The Rockefeller Foundation began a five-year subsidy of Fischer's German national "anthropological survey" with a donation totaling $125,000. Although the study was labeled "anthropological," it was in fact racial, eugenic and, in part, directed at German Jewry.

German psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin addressed the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene, in Washington, DC about “The Significance of Eugenics and Genetics for Mental Hygiene.” He said mental hygiene had a “right to combat” the “enormous number of the hereditarily diseased, inside and outside of insane asylums, by the feebleminded, the paupers, the neglected, those criminally inclined through heredity, the chronic drunkards” and “the psychopaths.” Heading the list of “defects” that U.S. psychiatrists later defined were “attentional deficits.” Organized psychiatry had parents, teachers and “support groups” searching for children with these deficits—a precise goal of the eugenics movement.

In December Eugenical News in the U.S. reprinted Rüdin’s paper, "Hereditary Transmission of Mental Diseases." In it Rüdin declared, "…there is no cure for the hereditary dispositions themselves….Humanity itself calls out an energetic halt to the propagation of the bearer of diseased hereditary dispositions.”

Psychiatry’s racial hygiene had become a scientific orthodoxy in the German medical community, taught in 26 separate courses of lectures in the medical faculties of most German universities; the major expansion of the department occurred before Hitler came to power. By then, “Academic medicine in Germany on the whole stood waist-deep in the Nazi sewer, and bears heavy responsibility for the disaster that followed. After 1933, degeneration [racial purity] became an official part of Nazi ideology.”

In 1932, U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport relinquished the presidency of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations to Ernst Rüdin. German race hygiene was now primed to seize the reins of the international movement and become senior in its partnership with the American branch.

Hitler came to power and the first concentration camp, Dachau, was established. He was already steeped in the Eugenics theories from Rüdin and other psychiatrists by this point. Dachau was originally used for political prisoners—Communists, Social Democrats, and other alleged political enemies but, later, was the first concentration camp to engage in human experimentation. The first commandant of Dachau was a former forensic psychiatric patient Theodor Eicke who was promoted in 1934 to Chief of all concentration camps in 1934. By 1936, he had become leader of the SS “Deathbed” units and did much to implement systematic physiological and psychological brutality.

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels asked that all German organizations be educated in “the eugenic way of thinking;” Bavarian Health Inspector Walter Schultz proclaimed that “no boy or girl must leave school without being made aware of the essence of blood unity.” All medical students were required to attend courses on racial hygiene at Germany’s state medical academies in Munich and Berlin.

During this time, the child killing centers were set up around Germany in psychiatric facilities, where children who were considered “inferior” in some way were starved to death by psychiatrists. This resulted in the murder by psychiatrists of hundreds of thousands of other “mentally or physically inferior” Germans.

Ernst Rüdin helped produce a sterilization law, based on U.S. legislation. The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring was passed on July 14, 1933. Special "Hereditary Health Courts" were established to make decisions on sterilization. The first genetic health court met on March 15, 1934 in Berlin. Of 348 cases, 325 were sterilized. Nine categories of defectives were identified for sterilization. At the top of the list were the feebleminded, followed by those afflicted by schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington's chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness and blindness. Alcoholism, the ninth category, was listed as optional to avoid confusion with ordinary drunkenness. The Reich announced that 400,000 Germans would immediately be subjected to the procedure, beginning January 1, 1934.

In a commentary in the U.S. Eugenical News it was declared: "Germany is the first of the world's major nations to enact a modern eugenical sterilization law for the nation as a unit....Doubtless the legislative and court history of the experimental sterilization laws in 27 states of the American union provided the experience, which Germany used in writing her new national sterilization statute. To one versed in the history of eugenical sterilization in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the`American model sterilization law.' Proudly pointing out the American origins of the Nazi statute, the article continued, "In the meantime it is announced that the Reich will secure data on prospective sterilization cases, that it will, in fact, in accordance with ‘the American model sterilization law,' work out a census of its socially inadequate human stocks."

Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Professor of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene at the University of Berlin, and close ally of many prominent Nazi psychiatrists, made twin research popular. He later supplied Dr. Josef Mengele with the necessary tools to commit his unimaginable crimes in Auschwitz concentration camp.

The Human Betterment Foundation in the U.S., an influential eugenics organization headed by eugenicist Dr. Paul Popenoe, created an exhibit of the Nazi’s eugenics program in Pasadena, California. Their newsletter boasted: The exhibit “portrays the general eugenics program of the Nazi government, giving special attention to the need for sterilization. Those who have seen this exhibit say it is the finest things of the kind that has ever been produced. Take the opportunity to see this while in Los Angeles. Tell your friends about it.”

The Nuremberg Laws were a series of three measures aimed at further “cleansing” the German population of inferior elements. Medical journals praised the laws. On May 21, every Reich health office was ordered to establish special advisory centers for genetic and racial care in order to construct a comprehensive “genetic biological map.”

Nazi psychiatrists attempted to “discover whether or not certain signs can be found among men which would allow the early detection of criminal tendencies before the actual onset of the criminal career.”

In a December letter to Carl Schneider, dean of the University of Heidelberg's medical school, Prof. Harry Laughlin from the Eugenics Records Office was nominated for a German recognition as “one of the most important pioneers on the field of racial hygiene.” Schneider gladly approved the honor. This same Dr. Schneider was a psychiatrist who in September 1939 helped organize the gassing of thousands of adults adjudged mentally handicapped under the project codenamed T-4 named after its location at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin.

The American eugenic leadership praised Hitler's anti Jewish and racial policies. In his presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association California raceologist C.M. Goethe said: "California had led all the world in sterilization operations. Today, even California's quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany."

Ernst Rüdin assumed leadership of Germany’s Institute for Racial Hygiene in Munich, one of the main centers tasked with deciding which German citizens possessed Jewish blood, and how much.

On secret orders of Hitler, 500 or more offspring of black French occupation troops and native Germans were sterilized in a joint Gestapo/genetic health court operation organized by psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, Fritz Lenz, and Dr. Walter Gross, among others. Some 200,000 Germans of all backgrounds had been sterilized by 1937.

In January, Hitler openly announced his plan for the “extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.” On August 18, 1939—just 14 days before Hitler’s invasion of Poland—a confidential decree was issued which required notification to the government of the birth of any deformed or handicapped baby or child up to the age of 3. Midwives and physicians were obligated to report all such children. On October 9, Hitler issued a further decree through Dr. Leonardo Conti, Secretary for Health in the Ministry of the Interior requiring psychiatric institutions to categorize their inmates as follows: those who suffered from epilepsy, senility, paralytic diseases, feeblemindedness, syphilitic disabilities, encephalitis, Huntington's disease and anyone who were "not of German or related 'species' blood." Forty-eight psychiatrists evaluated the applications, including Werner Heyde, Friedrich Mauz, Paul Nitsche, Freidrich Panse, Kurt Pohlisch, Carl Schneider, and Wilhelm Villinger. From a total of 283,000 applications evaluated, 75,000 patients were marked to die.

On January 9, the first “gassing test” using carbon monoxide took place in the Brandenburg sanitarium. Between 18 and 20 people were killed, watched by psychiatrists, physicians and nurses. In 1941, the psychiatric institution at Hadamar celebrated the cremation of its 10,000th patient where everyone—secretaries, nurses, and psychiatrists—received a bottle of beer for the occasion.

The Working Association of Sanitariums and “Caretaking Facilities of the Republic” was an organization established to manage the euthanasia killings. Psychiatrist Werner Heyde was the Director. It was situated in a street called Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin at Number 4 and became known as “T4.” It was the nerve center of the extermination campaign. At least 695 people were taken from Kaufbeuren psychiatric hospital and put to death. Low fat food was given to others deemed “useless” and they eventually starved to death. From this vile slaughter evolved “Operation Mercy Killing,” involving some of Germany's most prominent psychiatrists. By August 1941, T4 had already reached its original quota of 70,000 persons euthanized. Indeed, it had exceeded its quota—by 273 persons.

British military psychiatrist Colonel John Rawlings Rees addressed the annual meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene in the UK, stating: “We must aim to make [psychiatry] permeate every educational activity in our national life....[W]e have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine.” Further, “If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity....let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'"

In April, concentration camps began the new program designed to destroy inmates no longer capable or willing to work. All Jews were included under the project code-named “14f13.” Buchenwald was one of the first camps to implement the program.

On August 24, Hitler ordered the gassing of patients in psychiatric institutions to stop due to public outcry from parents and the church. Psychiatrists ignored the order and opted for a combination of injections, poisonings, and starvation.

T4 personnel, including “experienced psychiatrists,” were sent to the concentration camps and, thus, the psychiatric killing machine expanded to the wholesale slaughter of millions.

Julius Hallervorden, a brain specialist and psychiatrist from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, supported the autopsy of euthanized children for research purposes during the war. Children between the ages of 8 and 12 were gassed at Brandenburg. Dr. Hallervorden dissected some of the bodies for “scientific evaluation.”

As German psychiatrists were sending the last of their patients to the gas chambers, Dr. Foster Kennedy, professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College published an article in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association calling for the killing of retarded children aged five and older—children whom the author called “those hopeless ones who should never have been born—Nature’s mistakes.”

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned against the use of psychiatrists: “I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen, who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry.”

With the end of the war imminent, German psychiatrists issued a report for their future, stating: “Everything must be done to combat the frequent denigration of the psychiatric profession, and to emphasize, in contrast, the importance of the scientific as well as the practical value of psychiatry.”

Canadian military psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, who would become a president of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), addressed The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation in Washington, D.C. stating that the responsibility for charting the necessary changes in human behavior rested on psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and politicians. To prevent further war, “The reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people” needed to be the “objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.” Further, “If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil,” he said, "it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

On August 8, the governments of Great Britain, U.S., France and the Soviet Union, established the International Military Tribunal (IMT) to judge war crimes committed by “German officers and members of the Nazi Party.” In October, American psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert was appointed first as “Prison Commandant’s Interpreter” and somewhat later as “prison psychologist” during the Nuremberg War trials.

Nuremberg Trials.

Advising the U.S. prosecutors was Austrian-born psychiatrist Leo T. Alexander, who was trained in Germany before the war and had worked as a psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Buch in 1928. A staunch supporter of eugenical and biological psychiatry, he moved to Boston in the 1930s to become Associate Director of Research at the Boston State Hospital and Instructor in psychiatry at nearby Tufts University.

It was Alexander's responsibility to interview the Nazi psychiatrists and investigate the research and experiments in the concentration camps.

However, as Evelyne Shuster states in her 1996 paper, “Medical Ethics at Nuremberg: The Nazi Doctors and the Hippocratic Oath,” Alexander was very concerned with the role played by Nazi psychiatrists in the euthanasia, sterilization and other deadly Nazi programs, and “he wanted to make sure that the psychiatry profession be rehabilitated in the face of the world and get back the respect and leadership Alexander thought it deserves." Further, “he continuously sought 'damage control' to their reputation.” Alexander provided scapegoats for his psychiatric colleagues and, in a 1948 article in a psychiatric journal entitled, “Sociopsychologic Structure of the SS: Psychiatric Report of the Nuremberg Trials for War Crimes," Alexander laid the bulk of the blame for the Holocaust on the SS, then rationalized their behavior: “The master crime to which the SS was committed was the genocide of non-German peoples and the elimination by killing, in groups or singly, of Germans who were considered useless or disloyal....,” he stated.

Shuster pointed out, “Alexander gave a Freudian explanation of the evil of Nazi Germany. He believed that human beings were inherently evil, thus, making those who had committed medical crimes, particularly psychiatrists, ultimately unaccountable."

The World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) was established with leading psychiatrists as its executive. Several Nazi psychiatrists were delegates at the conference, including Dr. Friedrich Mauz, a former T4 consultant. Walter R Von Baeyer served under Ernst Rüdin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich in the 1930s and was an apologist for the Nazi psychiatric crimes after the war. He was WFMH president in 1959.

In May, 1990, Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg, former president of the German Society of Psychiatrists and Neurologists (GSPN), addressed an annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association noting that psychiatrists had failed to respond or were indifferent to patients during the Third Reich, thereby excusing their causal role in the Holocaust.

Consequently, and as Dr. Ernest Hunter in his 1993 paper entitled, “Psychiatric Responsibility In The Third Reich” published in the journal of the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists pointed out: "Entwined in this discussion is an apologist argument that removes psychiatrists from the nexus of responsibility."

Further, Hunter said of the Nuremberg Trials, “Only a minority of those directly involved were ever prosecuted, and most returned to comfortable practice in the new [German] Republic. This was supported by denial (and at times collusion) by fellow practitioners, and by the profession.”

Historian Muller-Hill notes: "Almost no one stopped to think that something could be wrong with psychiatry, with anthropology, or with behavioral science. The international scientific establishment reassured their German colleagues that it had indeed been the unpardonable misconduct of a few individuals, but that it lay outside the scope of science. The pattern of German anthropology, psychiatry and behavioral science continued essentially unchanged, and it will continue so, unless a substantial number of scientists begin to have doubts and to ask questions."

German psychiatry secured its future and, consequently, its pernicious influence continued unhindered and is evident in many psychiatric practices today.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)-researched acclaimed book, Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler was published in Germany detailing how psychiatric eugenics had provided the grounds for the mass murder during the Holocaust and that psychiatrists were directly involved with the killing. The DGPPN’s president, Prof. W. Gaebel responded by writing to the Minister of the Interior calling for action to be taken against CCHR for publishing the book. German apologist psychiatric view then claimed that doctors were the instruments of genocidal policies" and "insane domination," rather than psychiatrists being the creaters of it.

During that year’s World Psychiatric Congress held in Germany, the DGPPN published an “In Memoriam” exhibition which admitted psychiatrists were involved in developing the euthanasia policies and carrying out the killings during the Holocaust.