1 - Introduction

Summary

Only when it is responsible for providing psychological diagnoses for state purposes does psychology really become important.

Max Simoneit, scientific director of Wehrmacht Psychology, 1938

It is becoming … plain that psychology has ceased to be a science for connoisseurs. With activities such as selection, evaluation, control, guidance, and care for the mental hygiene of the healthy members of our people, with aid and advice for the susceptible, the endangered and the inefficiently functioning, it is becoming deeply involved in the necessary tasks of regulating, maintaining, and strengthening the Volkskraft as a whole.

Oswald Kroh, chairman of the German Society for Psychology, 1941

It is widely believed that the Nazis were opposed to science in general and to psychology in particular, with the result that they obstructed the development of psychology in every way or indeed threatened its very existence. In fact, the history of the professionalization of psychology during the National Socialist period was not one of setbacks and defeats, but one of gains and successes. This is certainly not easy for psychologists to admit, which is perhaps one of the reasons this aspect of the history of German psychology has often been passed over. After the Second World War German psychologists were more concerned with reestablishing their profession than with raising the question of the relationship between psychology and Nazism. Within the discipline there was some controversy, but public discussion was prevented by professional considerations and the politics of scholarly rivalries, not to mention the general difficulties of “reappraising the past” in Germany (see Adorno 1968).