Death of a Jewish Science: Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich Hardcover – December 28, 2000 by Eileen Brockman Goggin (Author), James E. Goggin (Author) (Purdue University Press)

Goggin and Goggin suggests that the Nazi ideology concerning the VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT (the people’s community) denied individual rights and prerogatives, and hence was itself incompatible with psychoanalysis. (pp. 43-45). The author traces the progressive removal of Jewish mental health specialists. The licenses of all Jewish physicians and attorneys were not revoked by the Nazis until September 1938: Those of Jewish Freudian psychoanalysts had been far quicker. (p. 101). The authors believe that the timing of Nazi actions had been governed by concessions to world opinion, especially in the face of the upcoming 1936 Olympics in Berlin. (p. 102).

HOW THE LEBENSBORN PROGRAM TARGETED POLISH CHILDREN

The authors comment, “Psychologists followed the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Poland to help in the most horrendous purposes of the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare Organization (NSV). Geuter reports that the NSV was involved in what was called the ‘Germanization’ of Polish children. In this endeavour, psychologists helped the Gestapo and SS implement Himmler’s decree to steal Aryan-type children from their Polish parents. Psychologists were used to provide an initial identification of Polish children ‘whose racial appearance indicates Nordic parentage.’ Those children were taken from their parents and sent to Germany and evaluated for six more weeks to select ‘valuable blood bearers’ for the Third Reich. Those children who failed at the six-week stage of evaluation were murdered. In this way, the psychologists who participated in the ‘Germanization’ program committed a crime against humanity.” (p. 87).

[This has chilling parallels with the present. Attempts have been made, by western European bureaucrats, to take Polish children from their parents under various pretexts.]

THE ORIGINAL FRANKFURT SCHOOL LIVES-ON IN THE USA

The authors write, “One of the ways that the Frankfurt school survived, however, was by toning down its radical Marxist rhetoric while in America. The Frankfurt school survived and endured in the United States during a very conservative period (the 1950s), and it helped influence the leftist student movement in the 1960s, especially the resistance to the Vietnam War.” (p. 68).