Chapter 16

PSYCHIATRY HARMING RELIGION

THE DEVIL'S DOCTORS - THE NAZIS HOLOCAUST

While some who support psychiatry and its materialist dogma may argue that psychiatry in Aum is unusual and such a thing has not happened before, perhaps we simply need to go back a little in time to Germany again.

While psychiatry has tried to expunge any connection between itself and the racial genocide of the Nazis Holocaust, the hard fact is that psychiatry spawned "eugenics" almost three decades before the Nazis took power in 1933. It was psychiatry that gave the means and justification for the Nazis to be mass murderers. And it was their ideology which fired Hitler's mania to eradicate religion.

As early as 1895, German psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz wrote: "Should it turn out that in spite of it the new-born is a weakly and ill-bred child, then a gentle death will be provided for him by the medical board, which decides over the citizenship papers of the society, let's say through a small dose of morphine .... (The parents) will not give themselves over to religious feelings for long but will try it fresh and happily a second time, if they are permitted to do so and have a certificate granting them the right to the procedure.

Within ten years, Ploetz founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene, joining with another psychiatrist, Ernst Rudin who would later turn sterilization operations into one of the Nazi's most prolific death machines. Declaring racial hygiene a "spiritual movement," Rudin and his associates worked to disseminate their ideas and principles to the public. Despite "Quietly and gradually winning over the hearts and mind of our best Germans," they could not gain support at upper government levels. Eventually they found a willing collaborator in Adolf Hitler. "Only through (the Fuhrer) did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality," Rudin said. 218

Hitler was not new to psychiatry. In 1918 he was blinded by a poisonous gas attack in the war. He was admitted to a military hospital where he was hypnotized by psychiatrist Edmund Foster. Foster put Hitler in a trance and implanted him with the belief that his

beloved Germany needed him to recover his sight in order to serve the cause of national resurrection.219

Hitler also was influenced by two psychiatric books: The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of value (1920) by Hoche and Binding, and The Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene (1921) by Bauer, Fischer and Lenz. Lenz wrote, "I have heard that Hitler had read the second edition of BauerFischer-Lenz during his incarceration in Landsberg. Some parts of it are mirrored in Hitler's phrases. In any case, with great mental energy, he had made the basic ideas of racial hygiene and their importance his own, while most of the academic authorities still look upon these issues rather unappreciatively.220

According the Horche and Binding the acceleration of the death process is not an act of murder but "in truth an act of healing." In referring to those whom the eugenicists would call the dumb, and those "not only worthless, but of absolutely negative value," the authors wrote, "Their death will not be missed in the least except maybe in the hearts of their mother or guardian .... When we become more advanced, we will probably be saving those poor humans from themselves. "221

With Hitler providing the public face and vehicle for implementation, the next few years saw an avalanche of legislation which legitimized psychiatry's demonic plans. On July 4, 1933, the Sterilization Act was enacted, clearing the way for wholesale euthanasia. July 14, 1933 saw the Law for Prevention of Genetically Diseased Children passed.

By 1936 the mentally ill were being transferred from the institutions to the concentration camps. By 1937 criminals and repeat offenders went to the camps. They were followed by the "vagrants, alcoholics, work dodgers, welfare recipients, and even already sterilized, feeble minded women." In the same year the Third Reich embarked upon a cleansing of churches and charitable establishments. People were relocated first into state institutions, then ultimately into death camps.

The number of sterilizations performed in Germany between 1934 and 1945 was 350,000. Frederic Wertham, MD, reported that in 1941, the Hadamar psychiatric institution "celebrated the cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient in a special

ceremony. Psychiatrists, nurses, attendants and secretaries all participated. Everybody received a bottle of beer for the occasion. " 222

Attacks on Religion

Whitney Harris, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, wrote in his book Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg, "The attack upon the churches was related to the purpose of Hitler to achieve a monolithic state and to subvert the German people to the criminal objective which he had set out for himself .... Hitler... realized that his aims were in direct conflict with the moral teachings of Christianity. By September 1941, the Gestapo had closed about one hundred monasteries in the Reich, and many theological faculties had been shut down or shifted so as to impede religious training or education.

The sources may have appeared many but psychiatry was the primary culprit. From 1940 to 1945, 2,800 Polish ecclesiastics and religious persons were imprisoned in Dachau. The Polish government reported that by 1941, seven thousand priests were killed and three thousand more were sent to prison or concentration camps. In 1942, 480 German-speaking ministers of religion were imprisoned. 223

It would seem logical that once it was known that the Nazis holocaust was perpetrated on a psychiatric premise, that there would be an international condemnation of the ideology that created it. However, after the war the World Federation of Mental Health had installed psychiatrists in Germany who were great advocates of eugenics and racial hygiene. The psychiatrists who had created the holocaust, such as Professor Werner Villenger, escaped trial and soon became the so called respectable pillars in society, to once again destroy the lives of the so-called mentally ill. 224

Psychiatrists created the Bosnian Conflict

What about more recent times? Have there been psychiatrically inspired Aum like killings? There have, but they are greater and have harmed more lives.

While the world looks on in horror, the Bosnia War Crimes Tribunal echo similar to the atrocities of the Nuremberg trials. However, very few are aware that the "ethnic cleansing" carried out in Bosnia-Herzegovina is based on the same psychiatrically inspired ideology that lead to the Nazis holocaust.

The apparent religious conflict between Serbian Christians and Bosnian Muslems was masterminded psychiatrist Jovan Raskovik. He was a frequent guest on Belgrade television and began to give vaguely Hitler-like speeches, full of nationalistic and psychoanalytical overtones.

In 1986, Raskovik co-authored the infamous "Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences," which advocated the creation of a "Greater Serbia," claiming the Serbs needed to dominate the Croat and Muslim minorities because of Serb psychological superiority.

Raskovik first introduced the ethnic cleansing program in Croatia before moving to Sarajevo to do the same. In 1994, he founded the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) and in 1991 he appointed his long time student of ten years, Sarajevo psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic, to lead the Bosnian branch. Together they established the concentration camps and allowed the mass torture, rape and murder of the innocent for a second time this century.

Raskovik died in 1992, but not before confessing on national television that he had been responsible for preparing the Serbs for war, and not before the mass extermination of the Croats and Muslems had started. Raskovik claimed that he lit the fire of Serbian nationalism in the name of "heaven, not earth. 223

Fraud and Quackery in the Name of Science

How can psychiatry affect a person's religious belief' Herein is a review of an English case history, as reported by Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, Psychiatry Destroying Religion.226

Eighteen-year-old Janice, a parishioner of the Church of England, complained to her doctor of lethargy and depression. She was torn by indecision, uncertain of what career path to follow. The doctor casually said it was "nerves" and just as casually prescribed antidepressants. Within hours of taking the drugs, she began to suffer black-outs. When the doctor prescribed minor tranquilizers, Janice became even more lethargic, unmotivated and began to gain weight.

She was referred to a psychiatrist who prescribed weight reducing pills to combat the tranquilizers. These pills gave her a high and low and subsequently she was diagnosed as having "manicdepression." After many months of loosing weight she had become gaunt and refused to socialize. She was then diagnosed as "paranoid" and the psychiatrist recommended electric shock treatment.

Janice was admitted to a local private Catholic hospital. Before the treatment Janice became alarmed when she heard her mother and four children crying in terror at the prospect of Janice receiving treatment. The next morning Janice tried to tell the psychiatrist that she had changed her mind about having the treatment. The doctor looked at a nun nearby. The nun put her hand on Janice's arm reassuringly and said, "There, there, child, doctor is here to help you. The treatment is going to make you feel much better."

"I was fearful of what was about to happen. Something was terribly wrong. But I looked at the nun's kind face and thought, 'A nun wouldn't lie,' and nodded my head in agreement," Janice recalled afterwards.

Janice woke several hours later to find two strangers by her bed. Pain exploded through her head. Between pain-wracked sobs, she managed to ask the strangers, "Who are you?"

"We're your parents, Janice," they answered. Janice recalled later, "I cannot describe the stunned feeling of betrayal I experienced at that instant = that I had been subjected to such violence by the psychiatrist and nuns, that I had forgotten who my parents were. For years afterwards, I felt a wave of hatred every time I saw a nun. Religion was anathema to me.

"After 10 sessions of this vicious abuse, I couldn't even remember my school friends' names, could no longer read or write properly. I returned home and vegetated in front of the TV set each day, wondering why life had become so bad.

"Finally I realized the answer; psychiatry. And in recognizing this, I saw that the nuns were as much a victim as I had been; that they had also been lied to and deceived. It took five years before my faith in religion returned, five years for the hatred to disappear."

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