Who Were the Men Behind Hitler and Why Should We Care Today?

German Scientologists marked Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023 by alerting their communities to the legacy of the industry that empowered Hitler’s final solution.

In cities across Germany, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) honored the memories of victims of the Holocaust with memorials and demonstrations. And they revealed the source of the atrocities, commemorated each year on 27 January, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Psychiatrists—they were the men behind Hitler. They were the pioneers of the Holocaust,” says CCHR Germany President Bernd Trepping in an episode of the documentary series Voices for Humanity on the Scientology Network. Trepping, joined by Nicola Cramer, researched and published the groundbreaking book Psychiatrists—The Men Behind Hitler. “What we found left us speechless,” says Cramer.

 

Trepping and Cramer have mobilized CCHR chapters across Germany to shine the harsh light of truth on the source of Hitler’s final solution.

This year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, volunteers organized a picket at Breitscheidplatz, a major public square in the heart of Berlin. In Frankfurt, volunteers erected a likeness of a grave on the main walking street of their city where they held a silent commemoration for psychiatry’s victims. 

In Munich, CCHR set up a pavilion where they screened the film The Age of Fear. In this film, available through the Scientology Network, Trepping and Cramer documented that the abuses of coercive psychiatry did not cease at the end of World War II but have continued unabated ever since.

After decades of work by CCHR to expose psychiatry’s role as the architects of Hitler’s genocide, in 2010, Dr. Frank Schneider, then president of the German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, admitted: 

• “Under National Socialism, psychiatrists showed contempt towards the patients in their care; they lied to them, and deceived them and their families.
• “They forced them to be sterilized, arranged their deaths, and even performed killings themselves.
• “Patients were used as test subjects for unjustifiable research—research that left them traumatized or even dead.”
• For “too long” German psychiatrists “have been hiding, denying a crucial part of our past. For that, we are truly ashamed.”

Each year, the International Association of Scientologists recognizes individuals for their relentless devotion toward the achievement of peace, education, decency, social justice and a drug-free and crime-free existence across the planet. For their decades of work forwarding the mission of CCHR to eradicate psychiatric abuses and ensure patient protections in Germany and in countries across the world, in 2012, Scientology ecclesiastical leader Mr. David Miscavige presented Trepping and Cramer with the IAS Freedom Medal.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a nonprofit charitable mental health watchdog organization established by the Church of Scientology in 1969. CCHR supports the enactment of laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive psychiatric practices, requiring informed consent for psychiatric treatment, ending enforced drugging and electroshocking of children and mandating severe penalties for sexual abuse of patients by psychiatrists and psychologists.