Church of Scientology Moscow interfaith forum to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The Moscow chapter of Citizens Commission on Human Rights marked Holocaust Remembrance Day January 31 with an interfaith ceremony hosted by the Church of Scientology Moscow. The tribute brought together members of nonprofit organizations, veterans, clergy, human rights activists, artists and concerned members of the community.

The program began with a musical lament and prayers given by three clergy: an imam, a rabbi and a Scientology minister.

Special guest speakers were an Auschwitz survivor and a Russian colonel who helped liberate the camp. They shared their harrowing stories.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights executive director screened a documentary that reveals the role psychiatry played in the Holocaust—Psychiatry: The Men Behind the Holocaust. The film reveals:

• Psychiatrists and psychologists created and promoted the pseudoscience of “eugenics” to “improve the race” by preventing “undesirables” from reproducing.
• Hitler hailed eugenics as the “science” that would rebuild the German nation.
• Psychiatrists gave the Nazis a “medical” justification for their genocidal policies.
• Some 40 percent of German psychiatrists joined the SS by 1933.
• As a justification for euthanasia, psychiatrists promoted that “feebleminded” people wanted to escape their existence.
• To promote their eugenic theories, psychiatry produced propaganda films that were shown in all movie theaters throughout Germany.
• They soon included Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, gypsies and homosexuals as people to be eliminated.
• Some 70,000 people deemed “mentally retarded,” emotionally distraught or physically handicapped were killed.
• They then exported the program to the German concentration camps.

In November 2010, Dr. Frank Schneider, president of the German Association of Psychiatrists, issued a public apology for psychiatry’s creation of the ideology that developed Nazi euthanasia and their role in the selection of those to be murdered.

The interfaith forum ended with a musical tribute in remembrance of those who died in the Holocaust.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a nonprofit charitable mental health watchdog cofounded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry emeritus, Dr. Thomas Szasz. CCHR is dedicated to eradicating psychiatric abuses and ensuring patient protection.