ABSTRACT
Health and medicine in the brutal and anxious Nazi context naturally took on great importance. The Nazis also faced more prosaic—that is, real—problems in the realms of health and illness. The Nazi concern with health also built upon the longstanding process of the medicalization of modern society. The modernization of Germany since the late nineteenth century had brought with it "the extension of rational, scientific values in medicine to a wide range of social activities." But despite the mobilization of the psychotherapists under one Nazi banner in 1935, radical Nazi health reformers posed a serious threat to psychotherapy in the early years of the Third Reich. These particular Nazis associated any form of psychotherapy with psychoanalysis, the despised "Jewish science," while also rejecting almost all psychology out of hand as at best unnecessary for—and at worst an affront to—the Master Race.
