[Wounds that do not heal. Extreme traumatization in puberty]

For the surviving victims, the persecution of the Jews by the National Socialists represents a form of traumatization so extreme as to beggar comparison with any other kind of traumatic event, say, a natural catastrophe. Interviews with people caught up in the machinery of persecution as adolescents have revealed to the author that they were subject to psychic lesions with devastating consequences hardly susceptible to adequate description in the framework of traditional psychoanalytic trauma theories. In puberty the internal separation process from the parents as love-objects is in itself difficult enough. When this is compounded with an external persecution situation the threat to a sound physical and psychic constitution is infinitely greater. In concurrence with other authors, and in particular with Keilson's concept of sequential traumatization, Gässler places particular emphasis on the transgenerational aspect of extreme traumatization.