WWII psychiatric atrocities reinforce current push for patient rights: mental health watchdog reports



LOS ANGELES, CA, November 09, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Executives of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International returned to the United States from an international mental health rights summit in the United Kingdom, where mental health changes were highlighted as evidence of growing accountability. These include new U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs guidance requiring greater transparency and consent before prescribing psychotropic drugs. Growing emphasis on informed consent, shared decision-making, and increased awareness of the risks and limitations of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs; expanded UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) warnings on suicide risk for patients of all ages taking antidepressants plus recognition of persistent sexual dysfunction, and the World Health Organization's new guide to end psychiatric coercive practices.

These developments reflect a growing international recognition that mental health practices have long operated with insufficient accountability—a pattern CCHR exposed in 1972 with the profession's role in Nazi euthanasia and sterilization programs. On October 15, 2026, the German Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry formally apologized for its involvement in Nazi crimes. "To this day, our archives contain specimens from over 400 individuals who were, with a high degree of probability, victims of Nazi crimes...We are also ashamed of the actions of those in positions of power after 1945, who contributed to covering up the crimes." Directors Elisabeth Binder, Nadine Gogolla, and Peter Falkai acknowledged their historical responsibility for their predecessors' failure to confront the past.[1]

"This apology is the institutional acknowledgment CCHR has demanded for more than five decades," said Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International. "Psychiatrists once criticized us for documenting their role in Nazi euthanasia, sterilization, and killings. The Max Planck statement confirms that sustained exposure of these crimes produces both historical truth and can lead to patient protections today."

German and U.S. psychiatrists had earlier criticized CCHR for linking psychiatry to euthanasia, concentration camps, sterilization, and killings. In the 1970s, then-director of the Max Planck Institute urged action "in the interests of psychiatry" to stop such attacks. German sociologist Prof. Peter Schulte, author of The Brainwashing of a Nation, documented psychiatrists' active role in systematic extermination under the Third Reich; they pioneered euthanasia programs and were largely not held responsible afterward. The Institute "pulled out all stops to refute or eliminate the allegations regarding its past," he wrote.[2]

In 2010, Professor Frank Schneider, then president of the German psychiatric association, addressed seven decades of silence: "I must offer our sincerest apologies—albeit shamefully late—to all the victims and their families who suffered such injustice and pain at the hands of the German associations and their psychiatrists." Psychiatrists forced patients to be sterilized, arranged their deaths, and sometimes performed the killings themselves through gas chambers, lethal drugs, or starvation. Inmates served as test subjects in research that left them traumatized or dead.[3]

About 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized and more than 200,000 were murdered in mental hospitals.[4]

The Max Planck Institute profited from thousands of brain specimens from murder victims that were misused for research even after 1945. Some specimens were buried anonymously in 1990. Independent historians identified victims from 2017 to 2026; remaining specimens are to be buried with names inscribed. The Max Planck Society funded the project with €5 million ($5.6 million); most specimens had been identified by the 2023 interim report.

The late Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal applauded CCHR's work: "I do appreciate from my whole heart (CCHR's) plan to openly discuss and to be active against abuse of human rights by psychiatry.... It is important that these (abuses) are pointed out and that all that is possible needs to be done to stop these crimes."

Researchers John Read and Jeffrey Masson linked Nazi psychiatry's past to elements of biological psychiatry today, noting parallel abuses in U.S. institutions and research. They described enduring themes of social control, damaging treatments, and theories that camouflage harm as being in patients' best interests. Today these include forced treatment with "drugs that shorten life span, and cause stupor and sexual dysfunction" and electric shocks that cause memory loss and brain damage.[5]

U.S. parallels include St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., where thousands of autopsies were retained and patients were buried in unmarked graves,[6] and government experiments on mental patients and prisoners that NBC described as reflecting an attitude "similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews."[7] Read and Masson concluded it is essential to recognize harm caused by mental health staff themselves.

U.S. agencies have issued related apologies. In 2023, Utah's Department of Health and Human Services apologized for its non-consensual sterilization program; the American Society of Human Genetics apologized for leaders' ties to eugenics; and California's attorney general apologized for early-20th-century involuntary sterilization policies.

These reckonings and the recent reforms on informed consent and drug risks mark concrete progress toward the accountability CCHR has pursued for over five decades. The Max Planck apology and new safeguards show that sustained advocacy can secure both institutional acknowledgment of past crimes and practical protections for patients. CCHR continues its work to keep transparency, consent, and human rights central to mental health policy in the United States and worldwide.

CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Professor of Psychiatry Thomas Szasz to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. CCHR has been instrumental in obtaining hundreds of laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive psychiatric practices.

Sources:

[1] "Nazi past and victim research project," Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, https://www.psych.mpg.de/2147643/history_uc

[2] Dr. Peter Schulte, The Brainwashing of a Nation: Germany's Scientology File, 2026, p. 33, https://www.brainwashinggermany.com/

[3] F. Schneider, "Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility," GMS Z Med Ausbild, 8 Aug. 2012

[4] John Whitlock, "An apology for the wrongs of the past: Eugenics in Utah,' 16 Feb. 2023

[5] "Biological psychiatry and the mass murder of 'schizophrenics': From denial to inspirational alternative," Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 24(2)

[6] Home of the assassins: Inside the abandoned psychiatric hospital…" The Daily Mail, 16 Feb. 2017

[7] "Ugly past of U.S. human experiments uncovered," NBC News, 27 Feb. 2011

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is an international mental health industry watchdog, established by the Church of Scientology, which had helped enact more than 190 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abuse.

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