Jared Emry

The Holocaust was a eugenics program that attempted to cleanse the Aryan race and society as a whole. Eugenics is the concept of breeding out traits considered to be inferior or the root of disease — societal, genetic, or otherwise. The use of eugenics through methods of sterilization and euthanasia became a solution to what was perceived by many to be a serious problem. Eugenics was incredibly popular in the world at the time. It was practiced throughout much of the western world in the form of sterilization. Hitler started the Nazi eugenics program only five months into the office of chancellor in 1933, and he began it as a sterilization campaign aimed at the mentally ill. The practice continued in some parts of the U.S. until at least the late ’60s. Starting with the mentally ill, the Holocaust spread to political dissidents, followed by certain races and homosexuals.  In this way, psychology was the primary tool used by the Nazis to justify and fuel the propaganda of the Holocaust.

The idea of Aryan domination first found a foothold in Alfred Ploetz’s The Efficiency of our Race and the Protection of the Weak. Ploetz originally argued the Jews were equal and indispensible, but revised his opinion after deciding Jews were too individualistic and lacked nationalism. Later, psychiatrist Alfred Hoche wrote Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, which spoke of euthanizing “life not worth living.” His idea was the mentally ill are merely shells of humans and they are massive burdens on society, financial and otherwise. Dr. Hoche even calculated the specific average financial cost of each mentally ill person’s burdens society per year (Cornwell 89). These calculation became central in Nazi propaganda. His work led to the euthanizing of mentally ill patients began, but the Nazis were forced to ban the practice because of public outrage. Despite the ban, most psychologists continued to kill their patients based on their beliefs in eugenics. Dr. Elizabeth Hecker was one such doctor who continued to kill her test subjects when she was through with them, she is even now still lauded as a pioneer of developmental psychology. Eventually, Alfred Hoche recanted after a close relative of his was disposed of.

The Holocaust started with the disposal of the mentally ill, but it moved past that. Prior to 1934, the Nazis had a neutral stance on homosexuality. Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, and many other officials were openly homosexual. Röhm was popular, became politically ambitious, and started to grow his own paramilitaries. Hitler and Himmler responded by filling the newspapers with rumors Röhm was working to stage a coup backed with planted evidence and used those rumors as a justification for a party purge. Himmler feared a conspiracy and thus the Holocaust grew to include the homosexuals (Oosterhuis 195). Despite that, homosexuals did not face the same severity of persecution as Nazi psychologists thought and proved homosexuals could be quarantined and rehabilitated. Again, the Nazis turned to the psychologists for justification. Mental illness is functionally definable as any culturally unacceptable deviancy or idiosyncrasy, and so with homosexuality considered to be a mental illness and also life not worth living. In this sense, the Holocaust never did move past the disposal of the mentally ill.

The Jews were next in 1935 and the justification was a little harder to reach. The breakthrough came when, “Erich Jaensch began organizing his biopsychological typology work around a notion of a superior ‘Northern integration type’ (the ‘J’ type), whose attributes he contrasted with an inferior ‘Jewish-liberal dissolution type’ (the ‘S’ type). The ‘S’ type — which he increasingly called the Gegentyp (‘anti-type’) — was described as intellectually rigid and abstract, yet with a tendency to become easily fragmented” (Harrington).

These results which purposefully aligned with the preexisting anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazi party were used as a justification and a source for anti-Semitic propaganda and the wholescale persecution of the Jews at the national level.

The corruption of science didn’t end with psychiatry.  The biologist Adolf Meyer-Abich gave a guest presentation at John Hopkins in 1933, where he showed a film depicting the Fuhrer principle in bacteria colonies. He failed to comprehend why the American scientists did not take the documentary seriously (Harrington 357). However, psychology fundamentally uses the culturally normative ideology as its basis for inquiry into both society and individual persons (Strous 8). Psychology, unlike the hard science, adopts an ideology and then builds evidence in support of that ideology rather than attempting an objective observation with analysis appropriate to the evidence. The field adopted the Nazi ideology as naturally as it adopts any ideology. In fact, it was in the Third Reich where psychology was first treated seriously by a governing authority and by a people as a whole with the Vordiplom Prüfung. The Vordiplom Prüfung, or the Diploma Examination Regulations, became the first professional qualification exam for psychology in 1940 making psychology a legitimate profession as it remains today. Even the modern qualification exams are nothing more than updates of Vordiplom Prüfung (Geuter 199).

The majority of psychologists intimately involved with the Holocaust would never see a second within the walls of a prison. Whether they had directly been involved with the killing or if they had merely claimed to have empirically proven scientific justification for the killing, they were given the most leniencies at the Nuremburg Trials. More psychologists and psychiatrists were prosecuted than any other group of professionals, but they were absolved of guilt because the courts believed the sterilization and euthanasia was legal. The majority of psychologists intimately involved simply chose to ignore their past, pretend nothing had happened, and repress their history (Oosterhuis). Dr. Elizabeth Hecker, who had maintained the first adolescent psychiatric clinic that tested and killed any children deemed delinquent or abnormal after being studied or experimented on, was never punished for her crimes. Instead, Dr. Hecker was elected an honorary member of the German Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Many others continue to be cited and quoted in modern medical articles without mention of the highly unethical and torturous nature of their studies (Langsdorff).

The evolution of psychology as a profession under the rule of the Third Reich and the aid it provided to the Third Reich is clearly demonstrated historically.  Psychologists provided Nazi Germany as a standard by which they could justify their worst atrocities, including the holocaust. The Nazis were given a position by which they could claim their opposition was both anti-science and a form of social disease requiring extermination. Any group they disliked could, and were, written off as antisocial and destroyed. But did this tendency to facilitate and organize the destruction of individuals with twisted scientific rationale end with the Third Reich?

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