Emil Kraepelin - prelude to mass murder

“The father of modern psychiatry.”

A protege of Wilhelm Wundt, Emil Kraepelin has been lauded as the father of modern psychiatry.

It is hard to find a person of greater influence on the direction of psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than Emil Kraepelin.

Kraepelin is renowned for his classification system of mental disorders including a definition for schizophrenia.

Taking the lead from his mentor, Wundt, he turned psychiatry away from philosophical considerations (and it could be said, including ethics) and toward only looking for biological causes – biological psychiatry.

Ardent eugenicist and proponent of racial hygiene

The influence of Kraepelin on psychiatry should not be underestimated. Where the passion lay behind that influence can be found in eugenics.

“In the first three decades of the 20^thcentury, German psychiatry had certainly a leading role worldwide in terms of scientific competence and recognition. For example, many psychiatrists from abroad were fellows at the newly founded German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry headed by Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin and his pupil and successor Ernst Rüdin, who first headed the Genealogical Department of the Research Institute under Kraepelin’s directorship, were two prominent figures who were ardent advocates of the degeneration and domestication hypotheses, and both did not make a secret of their views that domestication was the main causal factor for the alleged increasing prevalence rates of mental disorders and deterioration of the genepool.”
Martin Brune. On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics. 2007.¹

Further on Kraepelin’s perverse view of his fellow human beings:

“dreamers, poets, swindlers and Jews” possess ‘distinctly hysterical traits’ and fall outside the bounds of normality, adding that Jews exhibit “frequent psychopathic disposition.” These tendencies, he noted, are most importantly accompanied by “their harping criticism, their rhetorical and theatrical abilities, and their doggedness and determination”
R Strous, A Opler, L Opler. Reflections on “Emil Kraepelin: Icon and Reality” 2016. ²

“Kraepelin was concerned, for example, that ‘the number of idiots, epileptics, psychopaths, criminals, prostitutes, and tramps who descend from alcoholic and syphilitic parents, and who transfer their inferiority to their offspring, is incalculable. Of course, the damage will be balanced in part by their lower viability; however, our highly developed social welfare has the sad side-effect that it operates against the natural self-cleansing of our people. We may barely hope that the degeneration-potential will be strong enough in the long term to eliminate the overflowing sources of germ lesion. … Nevertheless, the well-known example of the Jews, with their strong disposition towards nervous and mental disorders, teaches us that their extraordinarily advanced domestication may eventually imprint clear marks on the race’.”
Martin Brune. On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics. 2007.³

What was the result of his works?

Did his work and that of his proteges bring about any sort of improvement for German psychiatry? The answer unfortunately is no.

Did his work and that of his proteges bring about any sort of improvement for German psychiatry? The answer unfortunately is no.

German psychiatry entered depths of depravity unequaled since. Only 13 years after Kraepelin’s death and directly supervised by those mentored by him, one of the great crimes against humanity that lay across psychiatry’s history occurred – the mass murder by involuntary euthanasia of hundreds of thousands of those described as “unworthy of life” by psychiatrists – Aktion T4.

Mass murder of psychiatric patients – Aktion T4

“unworthy of life”

While the program reached its initial target of 70,000 dead by August 1941, the program continued through to the end of the war and eventually included patients from mental institutions in Germany, Austria, occupied Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.

Aktion T4 was the Nazi psychiatric program for the “involuntary euthanasia” of disabled and psychiatric asylum patients – men, women and children – labeled as being “unworthy of life.” In January 1940, under the direction of psychiatrists, the first patients were led into the “shower room” at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre and killed by carbon monoxide gas. Other methods were lethal injection, starvation or being shot.

The primary ‘diagnosis’ that meant the difference between life or death was “can you work,” the simple determination of “unworthy of life.”

The number of deaths has been estimated to be more than 270,000. 70,000 were killed by gas, 100,000 through starvation and an unknown number were killed by lethal injection or shooting. ⁴

Leo Alexander, the United States Army representative at Nuremberg, had the following to say regarding psychiatry’s actions with Aktion T4:

“According to the records, 275,000 people were put to death in these killing centers. Ghastly as this seems, it should be realized that this program was merely the entering wedge for exterminations of far greater scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted. The methods used and personnel trained in the killing centers for the chronically sick became the nucleus of the much larger centers in the East, where the plan was to kill all Jews and Poles and to cut down the Russian population by 30,000,000.”
Doctor Leo Alexander. Medical advisor during the Allied trials of crimes against humanity by NAZI doctors and a contributor to the ‘Nuremberg Code’ that covered human experimentation which was written after the trials. From ‘Medical Science Under Dictatorship’ July 1949. ⁵ ⁶

Schizophrenia, a death sentence

And what of Kraepelin’s definition of schizophrenia? The diagnosis of schizophrenia was a death sentence or minimally sterilization, without exemption.

“What percentage of these had a diagnosis of schizophrenia? It is clear that individuals with this diagnosis were sterilized and killed disproportionately compared with individuals with other diagnoses. This was because of the strong belief among German psychiatrists that schizophrenia was genetically inherited and also because individuals with schizophrenia were less likely to have been able to work. According to Friedlander, the “overriding criterion” for selection for death in the T–4 program “was the ability to do productive work.” The few patients who were still alive in German psychiatric asylums at the end of the war were those who could work or had useful skills, such as a patient, formerly a dentist, in the Obrawalde asylum “who was temporarily acting as asylum director” after the staff left before the advancing Russian army. Having schizophrenia put one in the category of those for whom there were no exceptions to sterilization or killing.”
E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken. Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia 2010. ⁷

Between 1934 and 1945, an estimated 132,000 persons labeled as having schizophrenia were sterilized, and between 100,000 to 137,000 were murdered.

And what of Kraepelin’s definition of schizophrenia? The diagnosis of schizophrenia was a death sentence or minimally sterilization, without exemption.

Kraepelin’s proteges and forced euthanasia

The connections between Kraepelin and Aktion T4 are not merely based on his academia and promotion of racial hygiene. His students and proteges took an active part in its implementation.

Robert Gaupp

In 1901 Gaupp received his doctorate from Emil Kraepelin and worked with him at the Universities of Munich and Heidelberg. From 1906 until 1936 he was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tubingen.

Gaupp was an ardent eugenicist who believed in the sterilization of the mentally ill and his works and teachings lay the ground for Aktion T4 and Nazi eugenic programs.

Considering his influence, it is undeniable that Kraepelin bears responsibility for and helped set the stage for the mass murders of Aktion T4 and through his proteges provided the rationale and ‘scientific foundation’ for what became The Holocaust.

“Gaupp’s school gave rise to constitutional research and clinical psychotherapy. In particular, his advocacy of “racial hygiene” forced sterilization, which he advocated in lectures and contributions such as “The Sterilization of the Mentally and Morally Ill and Inferior” (1925) and “The Sources of the Degeneration of Man and people and the Ways of Repentance” (1934), prepared the ground for National Socialist eugenics.”
Professor Dr. Robert Gaupp entry. Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. ⁸

Guapp was a disciple of Kraepelin and there is no doubt where his ideas originated.

“A decade later in 1938, Robert Gaupp believed that his [Kraepelin) work was ‘indestructible’ and that it comprised nothing less than the ‘precondition of all research’ in psychiatry and the foundation of Nazi racial hygiene laws.”
Eric J. Engstrom, Matthias M. Weber. Making Kraepelin history: a great instauration? 2007. ⁹

Paul Nitsche

Paul Nitsche, as a protege of Kraepelin and had worked directly under his supervision at Munich University.

Nitsche was the director of the Sonnenstein hospital from 1928 to 1939 where tens of thousands of mentally ill were murdered under the guise of “mercy” killing (euthanasia). .¹⁰

In 1940 Nitsche became the Deputy Director of Aktion T4. As the program’s chief medical officer and psychiatrist, he had the duty of selecting people who would be labelled “unworthy of life” – those who were to die. He sent thousands to their deaths. In 1941 he was made the Medical Director and oversaw the entire extermination program including at least 60 he personally killed through human experimentation. ¹¹

After World War II, Nitsche was tried for his crimes against humanity and executed by guillotine in March 1948.

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ernst Rudin – “Reichsfuhrer for Sterilization”

In 1907 Ernst Rudin worked for Emil Kraepelin at his Munich clinic. With Kraepelin establishing a new German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich in 1917, Rudin would follow him and become the head of the Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies. Aside from a three-year break, Rudin stayed with the Institute, finally becoming its Director in 1931, as the successor to Kraepelin.

From 1935 to 1945, he was President of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists (GDNP), later renamed the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology (DGPPN).

From this position, not only was Rudin eager to offer both the institute and his and Kraepelin’s ideas on eugenics to the Nazis as part of the Nazi racial hygiene policies but all of psychiatry in Germany.

“The significance of Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene) did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30 year long dream of translating Rassenhygiene into action finally become a reality.”
Ernst Rudin. ¹²

By Lehman, Munchen, 1944. – Images from the History of Medicine (NLM), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45348908

Rudin joined the Nazi party and his fervor for the racial hygiene policies of the Nazis earned him the nickname “Reichsfuhrer for Sterilization.” ¹³

“In 1939 Rudin was presented a Gothe Medal by Hitler himself as the ‘‘meritorious pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich’. ¹⁴

In 1944, Rudin received a bronze medal bearing the Nazi eagle from Adolf Hitler, who lauded him as the ‘pathfinder in the field of hereditary hygiene’. ¹⁵

As the pioneer of Nazi racial-hygienic measures, there were few people who had more responsibility for the implementation of Aktion T4 than Ernst Rudin and he, under the influence of Emil Kraepelin.

“Kraepelin’s pupil and successor as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatric Research, Ernst Rüdin, who later was involved, together with Fischer, Baur, Lenz, and others, in the introduction of the “law of prevention of hereditary diseased offspring” (“Gesetz zur Verhinderung erbkranken Nachwuchses”) greatly acknowledged Kraepelin’s attitude. In a paper published in 1910 in the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Racial and Societal Biology), which was one of the leading journals in the field of genetics and eugenics, and of which Rüdin was co-editor-in-chief, he reasoned that the medical care for the insane was a distortion of the natural laws of the survival of the fittest and that medicine would be obliged to clean the genetic pool of the Volk in order to prevent ongoing degeneration.”
Martin Brune. On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics. 2007.¹⁶

At the end of World War II Rudin was interned in the US and able to convince those responsible that his responsibilities were purely academic. Astonishingly he only received a 500 mark fine although his influence on the crimes against humanity of the Nazis was far greater than many who hung for them.

Conclusion