Among the psychiatrists of the Nazi era, Carl Schneider, professor of psychiatry in Heidelberg in the years from 1933 to 1945, must be regarded as one of the outstanding perpetrators who committed crimes against humanity. Schneider combined political activities in psychiatry and research with his engagement for the first systematic extermination of a minority group of people under National Socialism, the murder of psychiatric patients. Schneider grew up in straitened circumstances, but he was able to attend Saxony's elite school at Grimma and complete the Abitur there in 1911. Schneider saw the "moral justification" for forced sterilisation in the thinking which was founded on the Nazi concept of the "national community", namely that the new state could only survive in a "living community ethos of the persons belonging to the state". In Heidelberg, Schneider was concerned at with managing the hospital and its new direction, and on electric and insulin shock therapy, rather than with intensive research activity.