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SPEARHEADING SOCIAL REFORM
Doctors of Death
Perhaps nowhere have the abuses of psychiatry been more widespread than in Europe. Yet diligent CCHR volunteers have made both the public and government increasingly aware of the atrocities perpetrated by those who practice this pseudoscience. It has been an effort requiring courage and, at times, strong stomachs.
In Germany CCHR has, for many years, actively investigated, documented and exposed the Nazi roots of modern psychiatry. While psychiatry has long tried to disassociate itself from the racial (and religious) acts of genocide in Nazi Germany, the facts are indisputable: Psychiatry spawned “racial purity” or “eugenics” almost three decades before the Nazis took power in 1933.
As early as 1895, psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz was eagerly promoting the murder of the “weakly and ill-bred child,” although he, of course, misrepresented his intent by benignly calling for “a gentle death.”
Within ten years, Ploetz founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene, joining with another psychiatrist, Ernst Rudin, who was grateful for the opportunity. “Only through the Führer did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality,” he said. Rudin was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry, one of a number of institutes under the umbrella of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The Society was the primary “think tank” behind the Nazi ideology and Rudin, as head of one of its major institutes, was bestowed with special awards by the Nazis and Hitler for his work. After the war the Society was renamed the Max Planck Society and Rudin’s institute became the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry.
 
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