Psychiatrists The Men Behind Hitler

Index.

80 years ago the greatest mass murder of human beings of all time occurred in Nazi occupied Europe. This began with the mass extermination of patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. This book is the only comprehensive and scholarly published work regarding the ethical and professional abuses of neuroscientists during the Nazi era.

In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. The suitcases contained all manner of paraphernalia: medals, gems, two cigar cutters, silk underwear, a hot water bottle, and the equivalent of 1 million in cash. Hidden in a coffee can, a set of brass vials housed glass capsules containing a clear liquid and a white precipitate: potassium cyanide. Joining Göring in the detention center were the elite of the captured Nazi regime—Grand Admiral Dönitz; armed forces commander Wilhelm Keitel and his deputy Alfred Jodl; the mentally unstable Robert Ley; the suicidal Hans Frank; the pornographic propagandist Julius Streicher—fifty-two senior Nazis in all, of whom the dominant figure was Göring. To ensure that the villainous captives were fit for trial at Nuremberg, the US army sent an ambitious army psychiatrist, Captain Douglas M. Kelley, to supervise their mental well-being during their detention. Kelley realized he was being offered the professional opportunity of a lifetime: to discover a distinguishing trait among these arch-criminals that would mark them as psychologically different from the rest of humanity. So began a remarkable relationship between Kelley and his captors, told here for the first time with unique access to Kelley's long-hidden papers and medical records. Kelley's was a hazardous quest, dangerous because against all his expectations he began to appreciate and understand some of the Nazi captives, none more so than the former Reichsmarshall, Hermann Göring. Evil had its charms.

This open access book offers a framework for understanding how the Holocaust has shaped and continues to shape medical ethics, health policy, and questions related to human rights around the world. The field of bioethics continues to face questions of social and medical controversy that have their roots in the lessons of the Holocaust, such as debates over beginning-of-life and medical genetics, end-of-life matters such as medical aid in dying, the development of ethical codes and regulations to guide human subject research, and human rights abuses in vulnerable populations. As the only example of medically sanctioned genocide in history, and one that used medicine and science to fundamentally undermine human dignity and the moral foundation of society, the Holocaust provides an invaluable framework for exploring current issues in bioethics and society today. This book, therefore, is of great value to all current and future ethicists, medical practitioners and policymakers – as well as laypeople.

Conceived as the answer to all of mankind's seemingly insoluble health and social problems, and promoted as a substitute for orthodox religious beliefs, the pseudoscience of eugenics recruited disciples in many countries during the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Nowhere was this doctrine more enthusiastically endorsed than in Germany, where the application of eugenic theory received its most fervent support. A program born of what were often contradictory opinions began, under Nazi rule, with the compulsory sterilization of thousands of Germany's citizens before morphing into the mass murder of the most vulnerable of the state's own population under the guise of so-called "euthanasia," before ultimately escalating into a continent-wide policy of extermination of those who did not fit the Nazi eugenic template. The progress of this inexorable descent into barbarity was marked by successive stages of development. From the practical application of euthanasia through the organization dedicated to it—later on called Aktion T4—and the killing centers that this institution spawned, to the centrality of Aktion T4 to Aktion Reinhardt and the Holocaust, important elements of the historical record can be seen to emerge. How did it happen? What impact has it had on contemporary society? And what of the character and fate of the individuals involved in the gestation and implementation of this murderously inhumane quasi-religion? These deceptively simple questions require complex and often disturbing answers, as shown by Melvyn Conroy in this important work.

Victor's book is the first to show that implementing the Final Solution was actually the root of Hitler's most disastrous military decisions.

Bernhard Schreiber was born in 1942 in Stuttgart after his father died in action as an officer of the Luftwaffe. His investigations into the Holocaust led him to discover that many of the guiding principles of the Nazis had global appeal. This is a reprint of his book, "The Men Behind Hitler" which was originally published c. 1974.