The reputation of psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century

The article evaluates the arguments used by German psychiatrists in the first half of the twentieth century to raise their professional reputation. The arguments, which were used in Wilhelmine Germany and in the 1920s, changed with the establishment of the NS-regime. While psychiatrists claimed for open care systems and for more transparency of psychiatric practice to the public in the first decades of the twentieth century, psychiatry became a crucial part of NS-health policies after 1933. The psychiatrist’s participation in the largest systematic action to kill mentally ill patients known in history forced them to search for ways to legitimatize the murder program and to integrate it into a therapeutical view of future psychiatry by trying to avoid arbitrariness and assigning research a central importance.