http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1097437.htmlBERLIN - It's a bit jarring to see an exhibition at the Jewish Museum here thatindirectly concerns the fate of German Jews but at first glance seems to suggestthat the museum is joining the increasingly popular trend of presenting Germans asvictims of the Nazi regime, too. It is unusual to witness a demonstration againsta Jewish institution in Germany, and against the Jewish Museum, no less. And evenstranger than that is that the demonstration is not spearheaded by an anti-Semiticor extreme right-wing group, but by an Israeli. But the most bizarre thing of allis that this individual agrees with most of the points made by the exhibition, amessage that he has actually been promoting all his adult life.Hagai Aviel, 51, one of the founders of the Israeli Association AgainstPsychiatric Assault, approached the museum to offer his help in organizing theshow, entitled "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." His hope was toconvince its curators that the show does not, in fact, address the Nazi regime perse, but rather a particular branch of psychiatry. Aviel argues that it waspsychiatrists who paved the way for the Final Solution. He believes the only wayto do justice to all concerned - himself, the museum, Germany, Israel and thevictims - is for the museum to extend the time frame of the exhibition, which nowis 1933-1945, and acknowledge that this "deadly medicine" was in use as late as1949, claiming the lives of an additional 20,000 people in special psychiatricfacilities.The Nazis were not the first to propose the creation of a "superior race." Indeed,the concept, an integral part of social Darwinism, dates back to the mid-19thcentury. At the dawn of the 20th century, there was support in several countries(including the United States, Switzerland and Sweden) for policies aimed atcreating such a race, which included such measures as castration of the mentallyill and others who were deemed inferior.AdvertisementThe concept was widely embraced in Germany after its devastating loss in World WarI. After he first encountered it in 1924, while serving time in jail, Adolf Hitlerincorporated discussion of it into "Mein Kampf." Subsequently, the GreatDepression spurred a gradual increase in the numbers who believed in the idea ofgetting rid of nonproductive elements and creating a superior German society. TheNazi party's rise to power gave that idea the official seal of approval.In 1933, Germany's leading psychiatrists opened so-called genetic-health courts,where people were tried for such "offenses" as manic depression, schizophrenia,alcoholism and the like. Between 1933 and 1939, some 400,000 German men werecastrated, after it was determined that they did not contribute to the party, thestate or science. A number of them died as a result. Also subject to castrationwere Germans who suffered from various disorders like depression or addictions.And of course, both Jews and Gypsies were defined as inferior races.On September 1, 1939, bowing to a request from the psychiatric elite, Hitlersigned an order calling for the systematic murder of people "judged incurablysick, by critical medical examination." This was the only document that linked himdirectly to mass murder, and its codename was T4, for "Tiergartenstrasse 4," theBerlin address where the request from an organization of physicians and otherofficials had originated. The house there had once belonged to a Jewish family andhad been confiscated in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws.The order resulted in the establishment of six euthanasia centers in psychiatricinstitutions throughout the Reich, and during the two years in which it was ineffect, a total of 70,000 Germans were murdered on the basis of this directive -most of them in gas chambers. When the order was eventually revoked, the murderousstaff who worked in these centers went on to the camps in Eastern Europe, where
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