There’s a free article in the Schizophrenia Bulletin (pdf) — Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia by E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken. You can see the abstract without downloading the document here.
It’s estimated that 220,000 to 269,500 persons with schizophrenia were murdered by the Nazis, which represented between 73% to 100% of individuals with schizophrenia living in Germany in 1939 – 1945. After the war, the rate of incidence of schizophrenia was high; the simplistic genetic theory about schizophrenia that the Nazis expected to be proven with sterilization and genocide was wrong.
Drs Ernst Rudin and Franz Kallmann promoted the theory that schizophrenia was a Mendelian inherited disease that was passed down from generation to generation. Rudin thought that people with schizophrenia should not have children— his research was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The concept of “race hygiene” was popular in Germany in the 1930s at the same time that the eugenics movement in the U.S. and Britain were peaking. States in the U.S. had been sterilizing “lunatics” since 1907. Dr. Rudin, after moving to New York, became the president of The International Congress of Eugenics in 1932. From the article:
In 1916, New York patrician Madison Grant had published The Passing of the Great Race, a jeremiad about the dangers of interracial marriage that Science magazine called ‘‘a work of solid merit’’; it was subsequently translated into German and cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
Dr. Kallman, who had been a student of Rudin studied twins with schizophrenia and also concluded that it was inherited. Kallman advocated an examination of relatives of people with schizophrenia in an effort to identify the ones who were not schizophrenic but that he believed were “carriers” of the recessive gene responsible for schizophrenia and had them sterilized. A year after that, he immigrated to New York where he continued twin studies.
While in Germany, about six months after Hitler had become chancellor, Rudin lobbied for the “the law for the prevention of progeny with hereditary defects” to be passed. The first targets were people who were diagnosed with mental retardation, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, epilepsy, Huntington chorea, hereditary blindness and deafness, hereditary alcoholism, and “grave bodily malformation.“
Most of these people were in overcrowded mental hospitals. Patients with schizophrenia who were being discharged from hospitals to make room for other patients, were the highest priority for sterilization. Overcrowding in German psychiatric hospitals was, at that time, a problem that influenced the decision to sterilize and then murder psychiatric patients.
The size of the population of patients in psychiatric hospitals in Germany went from under 50,000 in 1800 to just under 240,00 in 1913; which was not proportionate to the increase in the total population of the country. Also, over 140,000 asylum patients died from infectious disease and hunger during World War I, yet the patient population was quickly replenished. The asylums were chronically overcrowded even after hospitals stays were reduced from 215 to 103 days. In one asylum, two-thirds of the patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was being diagnosed more and more frequently. A massive increase of schizophrenia diagnosis was also occurring in England and the U.S. at that time.
The post-war economic and political crisis in Germany, combined with a booming psychiatric population were factors that led to the idea of killing patients which was promoted in a publication titled Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life which asked
Is there human life which has so far forfeited the character of something entitled to enjoy the protect-ion of the law, that its prolongation represents a perpetual loss of value, both for its bearer and for society as a whole?
which was answered in the affirmative. Then there was an article called The Eradication of the Less Valuable from Society, which claimed that mental patients were costing German society 150 million Reichsmarks a year. This appealed to Hitler who
… was interested in these ideas and is said to have ciscussed a program to kill chronic mental patients in 1933, shortly after assuming the chancellorship. He said that ‘‘it is right that the worthless lives of such creatures should be ended, and that this would result in certain savings in terms of hospitals, doctors and nursing staff.’ Prophetically, he suggested that such a program would be easier to implement during wartime, when public opposition would be less.
While planning to invade Poland in 1939, Hitler asked officials to draft a law permitting the killing of mental patients that used the term “euthanasia” in order to portray it as a mercy killing, which he put in place on the day he invaded Poland.
Hitler granted legal immunity to everyone that participated in the murders. A committee of psychiatrists sorted mental patients by their ability to do work, but required people diagnosed with schizophrenia to be killed without exception.
The authors of this paper are calling for more information on this Nazi program and feel that it should be studied as much as any other Nazi genocide. It’s only seven pages long, is written for a wide audience, is informative, and it’s FREE.