WWII psychiatric atrocities reinforce current push for patient rights, CCHR Summit reports
By Jan Eastgate
President, CCHR International
November 6, 2026
Executives of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International recently returned to the United States from an international summit on mental health rights in the United Kingdom, where recent breakthrough reforms were discussed. These include new U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs guidance requiring greater transparency and consent before prescribing psychotropic drugs.[1] Growing emphasis on informed consent, shared decision-making, and increased awareness of the risks and limitations of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs.[2] The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has expanded warnings on suicide risk for patients of all ages taking antidepressants, plus recognition of persistent sexual dysfunction.[3] The World Health Organization (WHO) released its new guide recommending governments end psychiatric coercive practices, implementing policies to prevent restraint, seclusion, and forced treatment.[4]
These developments reflect a growing international recognition that psychiatric practices have long operated with insufficient safeguards and accountability—a pattern CCHR has exposed since 1972, including the profession’s role in Nazi euthanasia and sterilization programs. On October 15, 2026, the German Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry said it was ashamed and formally apologized for the extent to which the Institute “was involved 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. Research conducted by the victim research project has confirmed this in many cases. We are also ashamed of the actions of those in positions of power after 1945, who contributed to covering up the crimes and preventing a thorough examination of the past.” Directors Elisabeth Binder, Nadine Gogolla, and Peter Falkai added: “We acknowledge our historical responsibility and take responsibility for our predecessors’ lack of willingness to confront the past. A critical and ongoing engagement with history and historical responsibility is a central focus of our work.”[5]
This apology is the institutional acknowledgment CCHR has demanded for more than five decades. 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 practical patient protections today.
German and U.S. psychiatrists had condemned CCHR for asserting psychiatrists’ role in euthanasia, Nazi concentration camps, sterilization and killings. In the 1970s, then-director of Max Planck, Dr. Detlev Ploog, wrote to government ministries and medical associations urging action “in the interests of psychiatry” to stop attacks on the profession,[6] including those from CCHR, which persisted in exposing the record.
German social scientist, Dr. Peter Schulte, author of The Brainwashing of a Nation, documented the active participation of German psychiatrists in the systematic extermination of humans under the Third Reich. Psychiatrists pioneered extensive euthanasia programs and, for the most part, were not prosecuted or held responsible afterward.[7] The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry “pulled out all stops to refute or eliminate the allegations regarding its past,” he wrote.[8]
On November 26, 2010, Professor Frank Schneider, then president of the German psychiatric association, spoke of the shame of seven decades of psychiatric silence.[9] “I stand before you today as President of an association that has taken nearly 70 years to end this silence,” he said. “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.”[10]
He wrote that psychiatrists under National Socialism had forced patients “to be sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves.” Patients were murdered in the gas chambers through lethal doses of drugs or by prescribed starvation. Inmates were “used as test subjects for unjustifiable research—research that left them traumatized or even dead,” he said. Additionally, “psychiatrists and representatives of psychiatric associations, repeatedly disregarded and heinously reinterpreted their professional duty to treat and care for their patients… psychiatrists abused and killed vast numbers of people.”[11]
About 400,000 people were sterilized against their will as early as 1934 and throughout WWII, and more than 200,000 were murdered in mental hospitals and institutions. After the war, this story “was shrouded in silence.”[12] Around 5,000 children were also murdered by drug overdoses. More than 70,000 psychiatric patients were deported to killing centers between 1940 and 1941.[13]
The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry “supported and enabled the forced sterilization of people who were marginalized and persecuted by the Nazi state. They knew about the so-called ‘euthanasia,’ the murder of people with mental illnesses and mental disabilities, legitimized it scientifically and profited from it: thousands of brain specimens from those murdered ended up at the Institute and were misused there for research purposes—even after 1945.” Some research specimens were buried anonymously in Munich’s Waldfriedhof cemetery in 1990 without naming the victims. From 2017 to 2026, independent historians researched the victims’ identities. Once complete, the remaining specimens are to be buried with dignity with the victims’ names inscribed.[14]
The Max Planck Society has funded the project with €5 million ($6.5 million) since 2017; by the 2023 interim report, the majority of specimens examined had been identified. Research volumes and commemorative books will preserve the memory of the victims.[15]
In 1979, Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), a renowned Jewish-born Holocaust survivor and an internationally renowned Nazi-hunter, applauded CCHR’s courage with its investigations: “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.”
In an in-depth examination of this history published in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, John Read and Jeffrey Masson researched the connection between Nazi psychiatry’s past and elements of biological psychiatry today. Systematic disregard for the rights and consent of institutionalized patients was not confined to Nazi Germany. Parallel abuses occurred in the United States, with over 20,000 eugenic sterilizations carried out in California.[16] They wrote: “Some might argue that what happened in Germany 80 years ago has little to do with how psychiatry operates, internationally, today.” They documented tragic, awful events that illustrated “themes present throughout the history of the treatment of people considered mad and which remain operative today: Social control in the interests of the powerful; damaging and sometimes even violent ‘treatments;’ and the capability of experts’ theories to camouflage what is really happening as being in the best interests of the treatments’ recipients.”[17]
Read and Masson note today that there is forced treatment of mental patients with “drugs that shorten life span, and cause stupor and sexual dysfunction” and the promotion of “electric shocks which often cause memory loss and brain damage.” These are practices that, at least to some, echo the abuses of the eugenic era.[18]
In the U.S., St. Elizabeths psychiatric institution in Washington, D.C., illustrates these overlaps. Thousands of autopsies on patients who had died at St. Elizabeths in the 1920s and 1930s were kept intact. St. Elizabeths is believed to have treated over 125,000 patients, with thousands buried in unmarked graves.[19]
U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut. As NBC reported, “Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society—people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.”[20]
Read and Masson summed up: “It is incumbent on all mental health workers, on all of us in fact, to be constantly on the lookout for our own failures to perceive the myriad ways in which humans are harmed by other humans, including—perhaps the hardest of all to acknowledge—by mental health staff themselves.”[21]
These U.S. cases—unmarked graves holding thousands of patients, large-scale autopsy and brain research on the institutionalized without evident consent, experimental procedures such as early lobotomies and truth-serum work, and official willingness to use those deemed to lack full rights—mirror the themes of specimen collection from murdered or neglected patients, anonymous burial, and scientific rationalization documented in the Max Planck/Kaiser Wilhelm history. They underscore the broader historical pattern of social control, damaging interventions, and the camouflage of harm as scientific or therapeutic necessity.
Like the Max Planck Institute, various U.S. health agencies have also apologized for adopting Nazi-linked eugenics or sterilization programs. In 2023, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services apologized for the loss, anxiety, trauma, and lasting side effects from the state’s past non-consensual sterilization program.[22] The same year, the American Society of Human Genetics apologized for the participation of several former leaders in the American eugenics movement.[23] California Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued a formal apology for the state’s early-20th-century policy authorizing involuntary sterilization of the disabled, mentally ill, and others.[24]
These historical reckonings and the recent U.S. and UK reforms on informed consent and risk communication represent concrete progress toward the accountability CCHR has pursued for more than five decades. The Max Planck statement and the new safeguards are not isolated events but evidence that sustained advocacy can produce both institutional acknowledgment of past crimes and practical protections for patients today.
CCHR continues its work to ensure that transparency, consent, and human rights remain central to mental health policy in the United States and worldwide.
[1] “VA moves to strengthen informed consent transparency for Veterans,” VA News, 28 Sept. 2026, https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-moves-to-strengthen-informed-consent-transparency-for-veterans/
[2] “HHS Launches MAHA Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 4 May 2026, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-launches-maha-action-plan-curb-psychiatric-overprescribing.html
[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2026/10/23/fda-again-lags-behind-uk-on-antidepressant-warnings-suicide-pssd/; “Antidepressants: new safety measures for all patients to improve communication of the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviours and persistent sexual dysfunction,” Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), 15 Oct. 2026, https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/antidepressants-new-safety-measures-for-all-patients-to-improve-communication-of-the-risk-of-suicidal-thoughts-and-behaviours-and-persistent-sexual-dysfunction
[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2026/10/16/cchr-demands-states-end-coercive-psychiatric-practices/; “Supporting the transition to community-based mental health and social care: Practical guide to the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals,” World Health Organization, 9 Oct. 2026, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240124134/
[5] “Nazi past and victim research project,” Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, https://www.psych.mpg.de/2147643/history_uc
[6] Dr. Peter Schulte, The Scientology File, (PI-Verlag, Wissen and LebenGmbH), 2018, 2nd edition, pp. 55-56
[7] Dr. Peter Schulte, pp. 54-55
[8] Dr. Peter Schulte, The Brainwashing of a Nation: Germany’s Scientology File, 2026, p. 33, https://www.brainwashinggermany.com/
[9] F. Schneider (ed), “Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility,” GMS Z Med Ausbild, 8 Aug. 2012, published online, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3420113/
[10] “Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility,” Speech by Prof. Frank Schneider, Nov. 2020, https://www.dgppn.de/schwerpunkte/psychiatrie-im-nationalsozialismus/rede-schneider.html; Frank Schneider, M.D., “Psychiatry under National Socialism: Remembrance and Responsibility,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Volume 261, Article number: 111 (2011), https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00406-011-0243-1.pdf
[11] “Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility,” Speech by Prof. Frank Schneider, Nov. 2020, https://www.dgppn.de/schwerpunkte/psychiatrie-im-nationalsozialismus/rede-schneider.html; Frank Schneider, M.D., “Psychiatry under National Socialism: Remembrance and Responsibility,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Volume 261, Article number: 111 (2011), https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00406-011-0243-1.pdf
[12] Registered, persecuted, annihilated: the sick and the disabled under National Socialism,” DGPPN (Springer), Exhibition Catalogue, p. 9
[13] “Historical project on victim research: Brain research at institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the context of the injustices committed under National Socialism,” Max Planck Gesellschaft, https://www.mpg.de/25150642/historical-project-on-victim-research
[14] “Nazi past and victim research project,” Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, https://www.psych.mpg.de/2147643/history_uc
[15] “Historical project on victim research: Brain research at institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the context of the injustices committed under National Socialism,” Max Planck Gesellschaft, https://www.mpg.de/25150642/historical-project-on-victim-research
[16] “Analysis: California’s forced sterilization programs once harmed thousands, especially Latinas,” PBS News, 23 Mar. 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-californias-forced-sterilization-programs-once-harmed-thousands-especially-latinas
Read, J., Masson J. (2022). Biological psychiatry and the mass murder of “schizophrenics”: From denial to inspirational alternative. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 24(2), https://doi.org/10.1891/EHPP-2021-0006
Read, J., Masson J. (2022). Biological psychiatry and the mass murder of “schizophrenics”: From denial to inspirational alternative. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 24(2), https://doi.org/10.1891/EHPP-2021-0006
[19] “Home of the assassins: Inside the abandoned psychiatric hospital which once housed a gunman who killed the President and two more who tried but failed,” The Daily Mail, 16 Feb. 2017, https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-4230332/Inside-creepy-abandoned-psychiatric-hospital.html; “Guide to the collections,” National Museum of Health and Medicine, 2024 Revised 8th Edition, https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/assets/documents/collections/NMHM_Guide_To_Collections.pdf
[20] “Mike Stobbe, “Ugly past of U.S. human experiments uncovered,” NBC News, 27 Feb. 2011, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ugly-past-u-s-human-experiments-uncovered-flna1c9465329
[21] Read, J., Masson, J. (2022). Biological psychiatry and the mass murder of “schizophrenics”: From denial to inspirational alternative. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 24(2). https://doi.org/10.1891/EHPP-2021-0006
[22] John Whitlock, “An apology for the wrongs of the past: Eugenics in Utah,“ Utah Department of Health and Human Services, 16 Feb. 2023, https://dhhs.utah.gov/featured-news/an-apology-for-the-wrongs-of-the-past-eugenics-in-utah/
[23] “Genetics Society Issues Apology for Ties to Eugenics and Racism,” Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Jan. 2023, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/genetics-society-issues-apology-for-ties-to-eugenics-and-racism-180981530/
[24] “Attorney General Lockyer Issues Apology for Early 20th Century Policy Authorizing Involuntary Sterilization,” State of California Department of Justice, 11 Mar 2023, https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-lockyer-issues-apology-early-20th-century-policy-authorizing
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