Posted on 03/19/2005 10:23:42 AM PST by scouse
How could this mentality arise and develop ? We should go back to the twenties to find the ideas which triggered all this.
The ideas
There was in psychiatry (not only in Germany) the tendency to make value judgements on the individuals and the groups on the basis of medicine or medical-sociology. Some pieces of writing considered scientific (even today) had prepared the ground.
The most significant work is "The Permission to destroy life unworthy of life" published in Leipzig in 1920, written by the renowned psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the respectful judge Karl Binding. The book had such a success that had to be republished in 1922.
This book defended the theory which stated that the elimination of "worthless people" should be legalized. Thus the concepts of "worthless life" or "life unworthy of life" used by the Nazis come from that book.
Binding and Hoche speak in that book about"worthless human beings". They plead for "the elimination of those who cannot be saved and whose death is an urgent need". They speak about those who are below the beast level and who do not have "neither the will to live nor to die". They refer to those who are "mentally dead" and who form "a foreign body to the human society".
The authors insist particularly on the economic factor, the "waste" of money and work to look after the retarded. They appeal to a "heroic attitude" supposedly lost.
Hoche was professor of psychiatry and director of the psychiatric clinic in Freiburg from 1902 to 1934. Moreover, his contribution to neuropsychiatry is considered valuable. Many eminent specialists were trained in his clinic (Dr Robert Bartenberg for example). His sane view of the mental illnesses classification had a considerable influence on American psychiatry, specially through Adolf Meyer, professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins. He himself considered The permission to destroy life unworthy of life one of his best works.
The other intellectual current which contributed to the massacre of mental patients was the exageration of the influence of the heredity of mental illnesses. Ernest Ruedin, professor of psychiatry at Bâle University, in Switzerland and in Munich is the best representative of this tendency. He was the one who provided the "scientific" justification for mass sterilizations of handicapped. He was the main architect of the law of involuntary sterilization in 1933.
The results of the studies on the involuntary castrations performed from 1933 to 1945 are still today quoted by the psychiatric literature, in general not in a critical way.
We can unquestionably link this intellectual current with the Eugenics Society in London which gave its premises to the Birth Control Society, the English branch of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (I.P.P.F.). The spokeswomen of the eugenic mouvement (Margaret Sanger and Mary Stopes) had in fact a racist language and advocated the involuntary sterilization of the weak.
Fine, I'll be a commie, as long as they admit they are the Nazis.
Read "The Nazi Doctors" by Robert Lifton. It'll tell you everything you need to know aboutthey get from"here" to "there"
From the great state of California: http://www.gottshall.com/thesis/article.htm
Along with more precise and specific terminology, the 1913 law also contained references to a "State Lunacy Commission," which was headed by Frederick Winslow Hatch. This commission had existed since 1897, but had not until this time been integrated into a coherent policymaking structure dealing with sterilization. Those suffering from certain mental illnesses could be sterilized on the order of the Lunacy Commission as a condition of release from an institution. In the case of the mentally retarded, or "feeble-minded," who were legally minors, the new law conditioned surgery upon the written consent of parents or guardians.
Even today, the laws won't allow parents of a severly mentally retarded daughter to be surgically sterilized because 'this life changing decision is non-reversible' or some blather like that. That is why we hear occasional horror stories of babies being born to women who are PVS.
Ironic that HINO Schiavo can have his wife starved to death, but not sterilized.
Impeach Judge George W. Greer of Florida's Sixth Judicial Circuit!
Planned Parenthood and the ACLU support a eugenics agenda, too.
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