Nazi Germany
In Nazi Germany in 1940s, the abuse of psychiatry was the abuse of the 'duty to care' in enormous scale: 300,000 individuals were sterilized and 100,000 killed in Germany alone and many thousands further afield, mainly in eastern Europe. For the first time in history, during the Nazi era, psychiatrists sought to systematically destroy their patients and were instrumental in establishing a system of identifying, notifying, transporting, and killing hundreds of thousands of "racially and cognitively compromised" persons and mentally ill in settings that ranged from centralized mental hospitals to jails and death camps. Psychiatrists played a central and prominent role in sterilization and euthanasia constituting two categories of the crimes against humanity. The taking of thousands of brains from euthanasia victims demonstrated the way medical research was connected to the psychiatric killings. There were six psychiatric extermination centers: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. They played a crucial role in developments leading to the holocaust.
Read more about this topic: Political Abuses Of Psychiatry
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