Donald Ewen Cameron - World War II

World War II

In 1943, during World War II, Cameron returned to Canada. Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal at the urgings of the world-famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield. There, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from John Wilson McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of the mansion of Sir Hugh Allan on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute was founded. Cameron recruited psychiatrists from around the world to build the psychiatry program at McGill. The team included psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists. Cameron developed a network of psychiatric services for Montreal.

In 1945, because of his reputation as a psychiatrist and the success of his instituting of psychiatric programs throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, Cameron was invited to Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess' psychological state.

Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron wrote a paper titled The Social Reorganization of Germany. Cameron argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. In his analysis, German culture was made up of people who had the need for status, who worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a deeply ingrained fear of other countries. The paper continued to state that German culture and its people would have offspring that in 30 years from 1945, would be the biggest threat to world peace. As a consequence, the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society. Other similar psychiatric diagnoses of Germany took place at the same time, such as Richard Max Brickner's Is Germany Incurable(1943), Paul Winkler's The thousand-year conspiracy: secret Germany behind the mask(1943), Fredrick Martin Stern's The Junker Menace(1945), Sebastian Haffner's Germany: Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany(1941) and Sigrid Lillian Schultz's Germany will try it again(1944). Along with Cameron's own testament to the experiences of life in World War II-era Germany, these texts gave the West both a historical and psychological picture of the German people as a whole.