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SPEARHEADING SOCIAL REFORM
It was against this background that the Church of Scientology in Germany established a CCHR chapter in 1972 which undertook a lengthy research project into the identity of the German psychiatrists behind the Nazi regime, the role they assumed in the “extermination camps” and how they escaped punishment during the Nuremberg Trials. What they discovered was that many returned to become “respectable” and influential members of society after the war. The result of more than twenty years of research finally culminated in the explosive and well-documented book, Psychiatrists – the Men Behind Hitler, released in Germany in 1994.
Psychiatry’s legacy is no less bloody in other European countries.
In Italy, in 1979, CCHR investigated the Mombello Provincial Mental Health Center and discovered the mummified bodies of former mental patients. The grisly collection included twelve bodies without arms, several sawed-open heads, some fifty brains, kidneys, lungs, arms, legs and ears. These body parts were so well preserved that the embalming fluid used to mummify them had permeated nearly all the tissues – a result that could only have been accomplished by injecting the chemicals while the victims’ hearts slowly pumped it into their bodies.
Mombello was by no means a singular example of psychiatry’s activities in Italy. In April 1991, CCHR and several government officials raided the Lonigo Insane Asylum and found that conditions in psychiatric institutions were only slightly better than when mental patients were being embalmed alive. Inmates were naked, locked into rooms where the floors and beds were covered with human feces and urine. Wallowing in filth and dying of disease proved to be the standard psychiatric treatment in Italy. Over the next seven years, CCHR Italy continued to raid mental hospitals throughout the country. Aided by Members of Parliament and covered by television news crews, CCHR not only documented and exposed similar abuses in dozens of other mental hospitals, but succeeded in closing down some of the worst of these psychiatric hellholes.
 
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