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The Holocaust and German Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg*
Affiliation:
Deceased, formerly President, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Nervenheilkunde, Bonn, Germany

Abstract

The Holocaust under the Nazi regime is probably the most traumatic catastrophe of our century and even of history in the civilised world. Its deepest abyss consumed the lives of one-third of the world's Jewish population, who were selected and murdered in a cold-blooded industrialised machinery of death in this their ‘Shoa’. The Jewish people represent the victims of the Holocaust more than any other group of human beings who suffered this iniquity. The Holocaust has left in its wake few survivors, and many invalids in body and in mind, who remain compelled to live with a trauma that surpasses any other deliberately caused by fellow humans: and it has left in its wake an entire nation in shame and bewilderment, stigmatised and traumatised by the horrifying crimes that were committed in its name, faced with the task of analysing what happened, so that it may never be repeated, forbidden by the enormity of the horrors from repressing the past, and obliged to integrate deeds that cannot be undone.

Type
Lectures
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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References

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