CHAPTER VIII
THE PHOENIX

Especially since the last world war we have done much to infiltrate the various social organisations throughout the country, and in their work and in their point of view one can see clearly how the principles for which this society and others stood in the past have become accepted as part of the ordinary working plan of these various bodies. That is as it should be, and while we can take heart from this we must be healthily discontented and realise that there is still more work to be done along this line. Similarly we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine...

If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organise some kind of fifth column activity!

John Rawlings Rees M.D.
Address to the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene June 18th 1940
During the war the name of Eugenics became even more heavily associated with the Nazis and consequently afterwards a whitewashing procedure began, the first step of which was the reconstitution of the various National Councils of Mental Hygiene. The first to be re-founded was the British National Association for Mental Health. But before we go into detail on this a bit of history is important.

Montagu Norman had been Governor of the Bank of England for many years. He and his right hand man Otto Niemeyer (of German origin) had persistently backed the re-arming of Germany made loans to Germany and encouraged the financiers of the City of London to do the same. Norman supported and financed Germany's cause right up until the Declaration of War.

When German troops crashed into Czechoslovakia in September 1938 Germany claimed Czech assets. They applied through the Bank for International Settlements, of which Norman was a Director, for the release of Czech gold held in the Bank of England.

The financial tomfoolery that followed would leave anyone confused, but the outcome was that £6,000,000 worth of Czech gold was transferred to Hitler's Government, released by Norman.

Before the war, Norman attended the christening of the son of his comrade-in-arms, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Finance and President of the Reichsbank, and in July 1942 was suspected of having visited Schacht in Germany during the War. This alleged visit has always been dismissed by stating that Schacht was in fact being held in a concentration camp for disagreeing with Hitler, and obviously Norman would have been unable to visit him there. The documents of the Nuremberg Trials, however, show quite clearly that Schacht had only been sent to the concentration camp in 1944 - more than two years after the suspected visit by Norman. Whether or not he visited Schacht remains a mystery but that he did financially support Germany is a recorded fact.

Norman had married Priscilla Koch de Gooreynd (now Lady Norman) who was a disciple of Dame Evelyn Fox, long-standing member of the eugenics society. In her own words she was completely dedicated to Evelyn Fox. And so Priscilla Norman had been working in the Mental Hygiene movement since the 20's.

Recommendations had been put forward by Lord Feversham in the week that War broke out, that the Central Association for Mental Welfare; The National Council for Mental Hygiene and the Mental After Care-Association should amalgamate into one Association. So, for the duration of the war a Provisional Association for Mental Health was formed under the Chairmanship of Lady Norman.

At the end of the war Montagu and Priscilla Norman gave themselves whole-heartedly to the establishment of such an Association. as Lord Feversham had suggested, in which the related organisations were amalgamated. As Montagu had retired in 1944, he dedicated himself completely to his wife's scheme and complemented her methods with his own. From meetings at Thorpe Lodge, the home of the Normans, the National Association for Mental Health became a reality and the framework for similar changes to take place in the rest of the world. Otto Niemeyer was made Treasurer, and the next phase began.

Upon the invitation of the NAMH, the international Committee for Mental Hygiene held a congress at the Ministry of Health in London, where it formally established itself under the new name, World Federation for Mental Health - WFMH. It became the international co-ordinator for national Mental Health and Mental Hygiene groups in many countries of the world, and besides a new name, the meeting initiated a change in the direction of its activities.

Already we see the strong involvement of the NAMH in the WFMH, and in future history the NAMH succeeded in exerting considerable influence in the activities of the WFMH.

Lady Norman was appointed to the Executive Board of WFMH and with Otto Niemeyer's niece, Mary Appleby, as the General Secretary of the British NAMH, the chain was complete. Miss Appleby s previous experience in the German Section of the British Foreign Office would serve her well.

The first elected president of the WFMH was Dr. John Rawlings Rees, a British psychiatrist who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The full lecture details a plan whereby each mental hygienist operates as a lone-agent, constantly feeding propaganda to private individuals and groups without naming the Mental Hygiene movement as the true sponsor.

He asks that constant propaganda be fed to and pressure put on: Universities, Educational Establishments, Medicine, Press, Parliament, Magazines and Weeklies, Literary figures, Film makers, medical students, civil servants and trades union leaders. To obtain the goals of the Mental Hygiene movement, without the movement ever being named.

In 1948 when he was elected Chairman of the WFMH he accepted the position on this newly-formed august body. The congress at which the WFMH was inaugurated was the Third International Congress on Mental Health. A Vice-President of the Congress was Dr. Carl G. Jung who had been described by Dr. Conti as "representing German psychiatry under the Nazis". He had been co-editor of the Journal for Psychotherapy with Dr. M.H. Goering, the cousin of Marshal Hermann Goering. There is definite evidence that Dr. Goering was fully cognisant of the euthanasia murders. Another of the German delegates to the 1948 congress was Dr. Friedrich Mauz, Professor of Psychiatry at Koenigsburg University. He denied his connection to the euthanasia programme, without condemning it, by indicating that his invitation to a euthanasia conference was no conclusive evidence of his complicity in any such activities.

Dr Adolf Wahlmann, a noted psychiatrist in the European League for Mental Hygiene would have attended if he had not previously stood trial and been imprisoned for the murder of Polish and other labourers in his institution, Hadamar, which had already been emptied by the mass-murder of all the patients contained therein. As already mentioned, Hadamar Institution trained many of the extermination camp officers on special assignments by T4. Among them there was a man called Gomerski who was engaged in mass killings at Treblinka and Sobibor with such skill, as a result of his training, that he was nicknamed "The Doctor".

Thanks to the propaganda and social education of the eugenicists and mental healers, the killing of mental patients has never been considered a terribly serious matter, and Wahlmann, a mass-murderer, was released in 1954.

Dr. Paul Nitsche would also have attended, as he was a leading member of the Mental Hygiene movement, had it not been for the fact that he was executed for the mass-murder of mental patients in 1947.

Shortly, other surviving members of the old gang began to gather in the WFMH.

Dr Werner Villinger had, after the war become a world-famous psychiatrist. His specialities included juvenile delinquency, child guidance and group therapy. He was also Professor of Psychiatry at Marburg and a very important member of the WFMH. He sat on the US White House Conference on Children and Youth. In the conference of the WFMH on Health and Human Relations which took place in Hiddesen-near-Detmold in 1951, he was co-chairman together with Rees. In 1952 he was a member of a WFMH group on Educating the Public which met during the Annual Conference in Brussels. Doris Odlum, late member of the Eugenics Society and Miss Appleby, already mentioned were Chairman and Secretary respectively of the group.

In 1961 German Federal Authorities caught up with Villinger and after three preliminary sessions prior to the Limburg trial, as we have seen already, he threw himself off a mountain top near Innsbruck to his death. His apologist and author of his obituary Dr. Ehrhardt, was also an active member of the WFMH.

In the book "Contemporary European Psychiatry" (a book on different psychiatric practices in Europe) which was published in 1961 in the United States and Europe, the Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Hans Hoff claims in his chapter on Germany and Austria, that sterilisation of mentally ill was a scientific procedure so long as a psychiatrist was adviser to the Eugenic Courts.

As did Ehrhard, Hoff praises the work of Villinger. Hoff was an active supporter of the WFMH, and in 1959 he became its President. Shortly after Ehrhardt's whitewash of Villinger's suicide, Hoff attempted an even trickier whitewash job, in a preface to Ehrhardt's book "Euthanasie und Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens" (Euthanasia and the Destruction of `Life-unworthy' Life) and he gives it full approval. Basically, they confused the whole issue by pointing out that the question of euthanasia is stilt a medical and moral one. In 1968, Ehrhardt was elected to the Executive Board of the WFMH. The book was favourably reviewed in an American psychiatric journal.

Ehrhardt also praised Dr. Max de Crinis as a "courageous and energetic physician" and spoke of the "comparatively few mental patients" killed. De Crinis had of course been one the T4 advisers. His former assistant, Dr. Muller-Hegemann, was left behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War ended. However, even so daunting a situation could not halt the course of progress and by 1969 Dr. Muller-Hegemann had been elected to the Executive Board of the WFMH.

The supporters of the eugenic movement from all over the world who had backed the mass-murders morally, streamed into the WFMH and its member associations at an alarming rate, and yesterday's euthanasiasts became today's Mental Healthists. Some of them kept their membership card of the Eugenics Society others let it drop, but didn't forget its ideals. Others again, to be fair, must have realised their error and disappeared from the picture, but this was only a small percentage.

In Great Britain the eugenically oriented salvationists who became active mental health supporters were:

Dr. Doris Odlum; Dr. E. Slater; Sir Aubrey Lewis; Dr. Lancelot Hogben; Miss Robina Addis; Lord and Lady Adrian; Lord Brain; Sir Russell Brain; Prof. C. Fraser Brockington; Dr. Felix W. Brown; Rt. Hon. Sir John Brunner; Prof. Cyril Burt; Comdr. and Mrs. B.R. Darwin; Lady Darwin; Prof. H.J. Eysenck; The Earl of Feversham; Miss Evelyn Fox; Dame Katherine Furse; The Earl of Iveagh; Dr. F.M. Martin; Dr. T.A. Munro; Lady Petrie; Dr. R.E. Pilkington; Kenneth Robinson; The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Scott; Mrs H.M. Strickland; Prof. J.M. Tanner; Prof. Sir G.H. Thomson; Prof. R.M. Titmuss; Dr. J. Tizard; Dr. A.F. Tredgold; Dr. R.F. Tredgold; Dr. Isabel G.H. Wilson; Prof. R.C. Wofinden; Dr. T.L. Pilkington.
In West Germany:

Dr. Werner Villinger (T4-adviser); Dr. Carl Jung; Dr. Werner Heyde (T4-adviser); Dr. Ehrhard (Villinger's Assistant).
In East Germany:

Dr. Muller-Hegemann (De Crinis Assistant).
The German Society for Mental Hygiene, however, was dissolved, its members scattered for cover and its reports left incomplete. Until today no new German Society has been founded on a national basis.

Villinger had tried to collect the Mental Hygiene movement back into one group, but the murderers were not willing to come together in a German society, where they could easily be isolated as a cancer. Instead they preferred the mask of a group from which they could direct similar campaigns on each country in the world, just as they had done before. Their names are still to be found amongst the professors for psychiatry at the universities, the staff in scientific research institutes, and among the members of professional associations.

In Austria:

Professor Hans Hoff.
In Canada:

Dr. Karl Stern (who studied in Germany under Ernst Rüdin).
In Denmark:

Dr. Georg K. Stürup; Dr Pout Bonnevie; Dr. Paul J. Reiter; Dr. Erik Strömgren; Dr. Einar Geert-Jorgensen; Dr August Wimmer; Dr Kurt Fremming; Dr. Jens Chr. Smidt; Dr. Tage Kemp; Dr. Max Schmidt; Dr. G.E. Schroder.
In Norway:

Dr. Jan Mohr; Dr. J. Schutz-Larsen.
In the USA:

Dr. Walter C. Alvarez.
In each of these countries, and in others, a National Association for Mental Health or an equivalent group existed which was recruited into the fold by the WFMH.

In Denmark, Louis Grandjean who had been Director of the Landsforeningen for Mentalhygiejne for 5 1/2 years wrote in 1954 "The Little Milieu" which was a study in family heredity. In the book he praises Herman Lundborg and Sören Hansen both notorious vice-presidents of the international Federation of Eugenic Organisations.

Stürup of the Danish "Landsforeningen" also had an interesting career. Immediately after the war he undertook a psychiatric study of Danes who had collaborated with the Nazis. The records and results on Stürup's insistence were declared secret. The effect is that these results are not available to the public and no-one can identify the Nazi collaborators and what happened to them.

In 1960 Eggert Petersen, former psychological-warfare operative in Danish Military Intelligence, was appointed director of the Danish "Landsforeningen". This may not be significant but it bears an amazing resemblance to the British NAMH.

The professional associations of medical men and psychiatrists were not immediately recruited, as the Board of the WFMH over the years contained many of the top men from these same professional associations. Influence was easily brought to bear on the American Psychiatric Association, the Association of Neurologists and Psychiatrists, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Nervenheilkunde (Marburg), the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and many more. Today many of these associations have joined the WFMH ranks of member and affiliated associations. There remain only a few professional groups in the mental sciences who are not swayed by the hypnotic command to "Kill".

The influence of a huge professional body could not be halted by the mere death of over a quarter of a million mental patients and others, and at least a million Jews in the T4 extermination camps, it could only be slowed; but the ranks are reforming for the next social onslaught which this time may not be disguised by war but by charity. Lord Adrian, member of the Eugenics Society, the British NAMH and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, expressed this kind of charity in a speech he gave in 1956:

"...preventive health services are bound to interfere with individual liberty... and if they aim at mental as well as physical health they must be prepared to separate mothers from children and to supervise the lives of people who would like to be let alone."




email toolan@enterprise.net
Return to Introduction
Return to Table of Contents