Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Germans and the east
- Part II ‘Euthanasia’
- 4 Psychiatry, German society and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme
- 5 The Churches, eugenics and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme
- 6 The Nazi analogy and contemporary debates on euthanasia
- Part III Extermination
- Notes
- Index
4 - Psychiatry, German society and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Germans and the east
- Part II ‘Euthanasia’
- 4 Psychiatry, German society and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme
- 5 The Churches, eugenics and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme
- 6 The Nazi analogy and contemporary debates on euthanasia
- Part III Extermination
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This chapter is concerned with the complex history of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme. In order to get this endeavour off the ground, the references are necessarily somewhat attenuated, especially with regard to the perspective of the victims. It begins by establishing the position of psychiatry after the First World War, concentrating upon the interplay between economy measures and limited reform during the Weimar Republic. Each therapeutic advance (such as occupational or somatic therapies) almost immanently involved the definition of irremediable sub-groups within the already socially marginalised psychiatric constituency. Nazi policy towards psychiatric patients during the 1930s involved further economy measures, and the introduction of negative eugenic strategies, similar in kind if not degree, to those pursued in some other countries at that time. The decision to kill the mentally ill and physically disabled was taken by Hitler in order to clear the decks for war, and was justified with the aid of crude utilitarian arguments, as well as with what limited evidence there was regarding popular attitudes on these issues. Many health professionals and psychiatrists accommodated themselves to policies which a few years later became one of the components of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, i.e. Hitler's long-harboured act of vengeance against the Jewish people in circumstances of war he had envisaged much earlier. This approach seems to me to have the merit of setting professionals in a broader political context, not always evident in accounts which stress the contribution of intermediate ‘experts’ to the solution of a putative ‘social question’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and ExterminationReflections on Nazi Genocide, pp. 113 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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