The Role of Psychiatry in Nazi Germany
and the U. S. Violence Initiative

Introduction to Dr. Peter Breggin’s filmed speech

This is one of the most spirited and yet heavily documented talks that Dr. Peter Breggin has ever given. It may be one of the most interesting and important talks that you will ever see and hear. Dr. Breggin was unaware of the existence of the video until very recently.

The talk was presented in Harlem in the early 1990s at a time when Dr. Breggin was blowing the whistle on and conducting a campaign against the racist eugenic program commonly known as the Federal Violence Initiative. In his filmed speech, Dr. Breggin begins by describing the roots of biological, genetic and racist psychiatry in Nazi Germany.  He tells the grim history of how the organized murder of Germany’s mental patients became the entering wedge for the broader Holocaust.  He also shows how the American Psychiatric Association supported the killing of retarded children in the United States. These historical facts, which had never before been presented in America, are covered in Part I of the video of his talk: Psychiatric Totalitarianism and the Role of Psychiatry in Nazi Germany.    

In recounting and documenting the tragic events in Nazi Germany and the near tragic events in the United States in the early 1990s, this extraordinary video confirms the need for eternal vigilance against the extremes of biological and genetic psychiatry.

Dr. Breggin has published a scientific article on medical murder and the psychiatric holocaust that contains many citations to the psychiatric murder program that paved the way for the Holocaust.

The history of the murder of mental patients in Nazi Germany as well as the history of the U. S. Violence Initiative is also told and documented in Peter and Ginger Breggin’s book, The War Against Children of Color: Psychiatry Targets Inner City Children (1998).