Psychiatry and the origins of Nazism

This paper examines the social environment in which the psychiatric profession evolved in Germany in the period between the bourgeois revolution and the onset of Nazism, and delineates the stages of psychiatric theory which paved the way for the murderous alliance between the profession and the fascist state. To bolster its professional status, psychiatry pretended to adopt the methods of the physical sciences. This led to an exclusive concern with genetically determined etiological factors and a rejection of the potential for therapy. Psychiatric theory thus became an instrument used to legitimate the authoritarian state's drive to isolate those who treatened to disrupt society or were economically unproductive. This development ultimately strengthened the racial hygiene ideology of the Third Reich and facilitated the extermination of 100,000 mental patients.