The Missing Link
Karl Bonhoeffer and the path
to medical genocideThe two assembled sculptures created by Igael Tumarkin in Israel, which he donated to the Landesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener Berlin-Brandenburg in 1999, are a political protest against the crimes against humanity committed by Karl Bonhoeffer.
He worked as a judge in the court for "genetic health" out of his own personal conviction and in this position and that of expert he enforced the sterilisation and castration of psychiatrized people.This act is a crime against humanity as it is described in the israeli law "The prosecution of Nazis and their helpers" § 1 (A ; 2) of 1950.
The significance of these sculptures is that they should shed light on the darkness covering the Missing Link between the racist ideology, which is based on biology, and it's murderous implementation, the Holocaust:
First there are the violent "medical" interventions in the bodies of the victims and then they are murdered!
These sculptures point to the crimes and proclaim his guilt. Up till this very day there has been no assessment of the responsibility of the medical organization for the construction of the camps of annihilation. Of all the professions, the doctors and the psychiatrists had the highest membership rate in the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) organization.Social control is the basis of conduct in psychiatry. By the pathologizing of behaviour, the attributing of illness, it secures the prevailing ideology in society.
In fact, the Nazi ideology was the realization of that which the psychiatrists had been demanding for a long time: Emil Kraepelin 1918: "An absolute ruler, who ... would be able to make unrestricted interventions in peoples' habits, would certainly be able to reduce madness within a few decades."
The Nazis fulfilled a policy of medical-psychiatry which Ernst Klee summarized as follows:
"It was not the Nazis who needed the doctors, it was the doctors who needed the Nazis!"Karl Bonhoeffer never had to answer for his crimes.
In Germany he was never indicted. On the contrary, up till this very day he has been honored: a regional and underground train station as well as the largest psychiatric clinic in Berlin will probably remain named after him. The Charité Hospital in Berlin insists on continuing to name a room in the psychiatric department in his honor.
This is only possible because his victims are "the others": "homosexuals", "schizophrenics", "half-breeds", etc. and therefore have no lobby which could have organized his indictment and the removal of his name from the above places.The Health Senator of Berlin, Mrs. Beate Huebner, answered a question of the Green Party in the Berlin Parliament on 31.8.98 as follows: "It is well known to the Senat Administration for Health and Social Affairs that Prof. Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer wrote expert opinions for the "Court for Genetic Health" during the Nazi period. Furthermore, he was himself a judge in this court in Berlin." As judge and expert, Karl Bonhoeffer was directly involved in at least 55 sterilization cases. They resulted in at least 26 mutilations which were carried out by force.
The valuable donation of the sculptures gets it's special significance from the fact that they are a transformation of two bronze busts of Karl Bonhoeffer. The first sculpture stood in the "Karl Bonhoeffer Room" (now called the "Gert Postel Room") of the Psychiatry Department of the Charité Hospital until Autumn 1998. The other sculpture stood on the entrance pathway of the grounds of the "Lady-Diana-Clinic" (formerly the "Karl Bonhoeffer Clinic").
Landesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener
(Regional Association of Psychiatric Survivors) Berlin-Brandenburg
in co-operation with the Israeli Association Against Psychiatric Assault