The Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany has issued a formal apology for its involvement in Nazi crimes, including the retention of brain specimens from hundreds of victims. The apology, delivered on October 15, 2026, by institute directors Elisabeth Binder, Nadine Gogolla, and Peter Falkai, acknowledged the institution's historical responsibility for its predecessors' failure to confront the past. "To this day, our archives contain specimens from over 400 individuals who were, with a high degree of probability, victims of Nazi crimes," the directors stated. "We are also ashamed of the actions of those in positions of power after 1945, who contributed to covering up the crimes." The statement marks a significant victory for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International, which has documented psychiatry's role in Nazi euthanasia and sterilization programs since 1972.
The apology follows decades of denial. CCHR President Jan Eastgate noted that psychiatrists once criticized the group for linking psychiatry to euthanasia, concentration camps, sterilization, and killings. In the 1970s, the then-director of the Max Planck Institute urged action "in the interests of psychiatry" to stop such attacks. German sociologist Prof. Peter Schulte, author of The Brainwashing of a Nation, documented how psychiatrists pioneered euthanasia programs and were largely not held responsible afterward, writing that the Institute "pulled out all stops to refute or eliminate the allegations regarding its past." The Max Planck Institute's own history project now confirms that roughly 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized and more than 200,000 murdered in mental hospitals under the Third Reich. The Institute profited from thousands of brain specimens taken from murder victims and misused for research even after 1945. Some specimens were buried anonymously in 1990; independent historians identified victims from 2017 to 2026, and remaining specimens are to be buried with names inscribed. The Max Planck Society funded the project with €5 million ($5.6 million).
"This apology is the institutional acknowledgment CCHR has demanded for more than five decades," Eastgate said. "The Max Planck statement confirms that sustained exposure of these crimes produces both historical truth and can lead to patient protections today." Those protections are emerging globally. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has issued new guidance requiring greater transparency and consent before prescribing psychotropic drugs. The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency expanded warnings on suicide risk for patients of all ages taking antidepressants and recognized persistent sexual dysfunction. The World Health Organization released a new guide to end psychiatric coercive practices. These reforms reflect growing recognition that mental health practices have long operated with insufficient accountability—a pattern CCHR has exposed since its founding in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Professor of Psychiatry Thomas Szasz. The organization has helped enact more than 190 worldwide reforms protecting the public from abusive or coercive psychiatric practices.
The implications extend beyond historical reckoning. Researchers John Read and Jeffrey Masson have linked Nazi psychiatry's past to elements of biological psychiatry today, noting parallel abuses such as forced treatment with drugs that shorten lifespan and cause stupor and sexual dysfunction, and electric shocks that cause memory loss and brain damage. U.S. parallels include St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where thousands of autopsies were retained and patients buried in unmarked graves, and government experiments on mental patients and prisoners that NBC described as reflecting an attitude "similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews." The Max Planck apology, combined with new safeguards on informed consent and drug risks, demonstrates that sustained advocacy can secure both institutional acknowledgment of past crimes and practical protections for patients. For readers, the development signals a shifting landscape in mental health policy where transparency, consent, and human rights are increasingly central—and where historical abuses are finally being acknowledged by the institutions that committed them.
