The Holocaust: Reflections on Racial and Religious Persecution

Brussels, Belgium, February 16, 2017 (Newswire.com) - ​​​​​The Brussels Branch of Churches of Scientology for Europe hosted a conference 9 February organized by the Belgium branch of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) on the theme “Reflections on racial and religious persecution.”

The conference, held to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, exposed a hidden source of racism.

"The same oppressive actions of psychiatry in the Nazi era such as kidnapping, forced incarceration, forced treatment and the abduction of children, continue to an alarming frequency in all civilized countries, including France and Belgium."

Frédéric Grossmann, CCHR France president

CCHR France president Frédéric Grossmann screened the CCHR documentary The Age of Fear: Psychiatry's Reign of Terror. The film reveals psychiatry’s hidden role in the horrors committed by Hitler and his henchmen against those they designated “unworthy of living.”

Psychiatric mass murder programs carried out in the name of “racial hygiene,” or eugenics, set the pattern for the Holocaust. Psychiatrists established a network of 31 psychiatric killing centers to carry out the murder of mentally challenged and disabled children.

Professor Frank Schneider, psychiatrist and president of the German Psychiatric Association, describes the next phase of their program: “Patients selected for death would be collected from their hospitals in grey busses that have now come to symbolize their killings, and they were taken to one of six mental institutions equipped with gas chambers. Medical facilities thus became extermination centers. Healing turned into extermination. Psychiatrists supervised the transport and murder of patients entrusted to their care.”

More than 70,000 mentally or physically disabled people were killed. When it was decided to move the killing into the concentration camps, the Nazis called on top German psychiatrists to execute the plan.

But while many believe these atrocities ended along with the Second World War, CCHR’s Grossmann says this is not so. “In fact, many of the same oppressive actions of psychiatry in the Nazi era such as kidnapping, forced incarceration, forced treatment and the abduction of children, continue to an alarming frequency in all civilized countries, including France and Belgium.”

The film documents that the psychiatrists who perpetrated these crimes escaped justice after the war, reintegrated into postwar Germany and made their racist ideology the very foundation of what is now modern psychiatry.

The Age of Fear may be viewed on the CCHR website.  Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a nonprofit charitable mental health watchdog cofounded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry emeritus, Dr. Thomas Szasz. CCHR is dedicated to eradicating psychiatric abuses and ensuring patient protection.

Source: The Brussels Branch of Churches of Scientology for Europe