[Compulsory sterilization and euthanasia--on the origins of a development that lead to the Fascist management of psychiatric patients].

When discussing and dealing with the way things went with German psychiatry during fascism the question arises constantly as to the scientific and theoretic self-interpretation of a specialist discipline that allowed itself to be misused without offering much resistance, if at all. The article makes an attempt to trace a few paths of specialist ideology at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The misuse of psychiatry and by psychiatry that has been practised both in the past and in the present cannot be understood if the guiding concepts of science generally ruling at the time are ignored.