A new documentary just released by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), The Age of Fear: Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror, reveals shocking new facts surrounding the hidden psychiatric influence behind the horrors Hitler and his henchmen unleashed on those they deemed “unworthy of life” during the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.
The documentary is a lesson from history: the untold story of the mass murder programs before the Holocaust, and the psychiatrists who conceived, organized and ran them — down to passing judgment on who would live and who would die. Some 300,000 mentally and physically disabled people were murdered, another 6,000 died from enforced sterilization operations. And most alarmingly, these psychiatric atrocities did not stop with the end of World War II.
In fact, many of psychiatry’s same oppressive actions of the Nazi era—kidnapping, involuntary incarceration, enforced treatment and the forcible taking of children—are still occurring today and are frighteningly rampant, CCHR says, in every civilized country, including the United States.
The film includes disturbing footage of the president of the German Association of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (DGPPN), Dr. Frank Schneider, recently confessing to his colleagues that “under National Socialism [Nazism], psychiatrists showed contempt for their fellow man. They lied to and deceived the patients in their care and their families. They forced them to be sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves. They were also murdering physically and mentally disabled children in over 30 psychiatric and pediatric hospitals as part of what is usually called ‘child euthanasia.'”
Meticulously researched and replete with a wealth of archival footage, The Age of Fear provides a comprehensive timeline on just how this shameful era in history came about—and how those psychiatrists most culpable were able to escape justice after the war, blend back into postwar Germany, and turn their racist ideology into the very cornerstone of what has become modern psychiatry today.
The Age of Fear is destined to outrage and appall, but above all, warn viewers that in psychiatry, history always repeats itself. (Watch an excerpt from The Age of Fear: Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror.)
For 44 years, CCHR has independently investigated and exposed psychiatric violations of human rights. It was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz and has helped spearhead more than 150 reforms in the mental health field.