GERMAN psychiatry has asked for forgiveness for the crimes committed in its name during Nazi rule. The German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology has just embarked on the kind of moral housekeeping that government agencies and big businesses have been doing for the past decade.
Yesterday MON it asked the families of 2,000 Jewish psychiatrists banished from its ranks over 65 years ago for forgiveness. Many of them were murdered.
“We are ashamed,” said Frank Schneider, association president. “It is hardly possible to give a justification of why it took so long.”
Psychiatry - a branch of medicine deeply suspicious in the eyes of Hitler - allied itself to the darker experiments of the regime involving racial breeding and profiling.
Not only that, some 300,000 psychiatric patients, declared to be “useless eaters” in the parlance of Nazism, were murdered in secret killing installations in Germany. Many thousands of others were forcibly sterilised on the orders of Hitler.
The association announced on Monday that it has commissioned independent historians to research its entire history during the 12 year lifespan at a cost of nearly 150,000 pounds. Mr. Schneider added; “Whatever the outcome, the results will be published for all to see.”
Recently both the foreign and finance ministries revealed the details of research into their respective Nazi pasts and both were found to have been ardent supporters of the Holocaust which claimed six million Jewish lives