Friedrich Mauz: T4 assessor and military psychiatrist

Silberzahn-Jandt G, Schmuhl H-W. Friedrich Mauz – T4-Gutachter und Militärpsychiater. Der Nervenarzt. 2012;83(3):321-328.Friedrich Mauz is one of the medical perpetrators of the second tier whose biography is difficult to comprehend. Autobiographies from three different political systems exist - Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and postwar Germany in which he constantly reinvented himself. While after 1933 he suddenly emphasized his participation in the civil war turmoil during the early period of the Weimar Republic and his patriotism, he then depicted himself after 1945 as an apolitical person characterized by Wurttemberg pietism who inwardly rejected the Nazi State but had found himself prepared to accept aEuroall sorts of humiliating concessions." He claimed that he had always remained true to his scientific code of conduct and had distanced himself from psychiatric genetics. In point of fact, Mauz was among those exonerated in the denazification trial in 1946 and was able to pursue his career in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, if the sources are read against the grain, a different picture emerges. Mauz's career stalled in the 1930s, not because he had been politically offensive, but because his scientific work was flimsy and considered lacking originality, particularly since he had chosen constitution research and psychotherapy as his main fields of interest, which were overshadowed by research in genetic psychiatry in the 1930s. Mauz tendered his services to the Nazi policy of genetic health, served as a medical assessor in proceedings based on the aEuroLaw for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring," permitted himself to be recruited for the T4 program as a medical expert, even participated in the deliberations on a future aEuroLaw on Euthanasia," and as a consulting psychiatrist for the German Armed Forces contributed to military medicine

The neuropathology of morality: Germany 1930–1960

This article analyzes brain scientists' attempts to trace morality in the brain in Germany from 1930 to 1960. The debate around Karl Kleist's localization of the Gemeinschafts-Ich [community-I] in the 1930s is depicted in order to illustrate the central arguments for and against localizations of morality. The focus of this article is on the period 1936-1960 in which experts put forth specific ideas on morality's cerebral underpinnings that mirror the larger theoretical shift from strict localization doctrine to a more holistic understanding of the brain. As a result of this shift, experts avoided exact localizations of morality. Instead, they posited correlations between brain areas and morality. The analysis illustrates the dependence of neuropathological research on morality on general theories of brain functioning and marks a first contribution to the history of the neuroscience of morality for the time after 1930