ABSTRACT
An analysis of various power bastions within the regime had in fact been anticipated during the war by study of the major economic centers of power in Nazi Germany. Psychotherapists in Germany were confronted in 1933 with a radically new political landscape filled with many dangers and some opportunities, but their major concern as a group, especially during the early years of the Third Reich, turned out to be an ongoing confrontation with their old nemesis, the psychiatrists. The reorganization of the patriotically renamed German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy between 1933 and 1936. The president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, was politically suspect in the eyes of the new regime. Matthias Heinrich Goring's personal nature and intellectual limits corresponded to the predominant task of psychotherapists in the Third Reich under the protection of his name: the opportunistic mobilization of their expertise in service to the Nazi regime in pursuit of professional autonomy and development.
