How West German Psychiatrists Learnt to Assess the Compensation Claims of Holocaust Survivors: Concepts, Contexts, and Controversies

After 1945, when Holocaust survivors filed for compensation for the mental health damages they had suffered during Nazi persecution, German doctors were ill-prepared for the task. Out of the experiences of World War I, German psychiatry had established a doctrine of the unlimited resilience of the healthy brain and had held on to it over the ensuing decades. This paper explains the origins of this doctrine, and contrasts it with simultaneous British and American developments; it goes on to analyze the debates of post-war West German reform psychiatrists slowly coming to grips with presentations of extreme trauma. After sketching the political and legal framework, it illuminates the medical experts’ search for an adequate terminology, outlines their controversial methodological and ethical background discussions, and describes an emerging paradigm shift in collaboration with psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists in the U.S. Central aspects of the reintegration of German psychiatry into the international discourse are also explored. Finally, this contribution points to aspects of continuity and discontinuity in the construction of post-traumatic stress disorder as a universalized trauma concept in the 1970s.