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Follow on Google News | Austrian Psychology during the National Socialist EraBy: Austrian Science Fund FWF "It is a sad fact", says psychologist Gerhard Benetka from the Sigmund Freud University Vienna "that applied psychology flourished during the National Socialist era – and the history of Austrian psychology after the "Anschluss" in 1938 has not yet been systematically documented." Practical psychology The focus of the project is on the links between National Socialist policies and developments within the discipline of psychology. Preliminary research has shown that psychologists willingly put their expertise at the service of the regime's racial and war policies, e.g. in the selection of German army officers, in the testing of the suitability of prisoners of war for working in the munitions industry and, in the context of welfare and health policy, in the classification of children and young people as "aufwandunwü Crimes against humanity The project is dedicated above all to the role of psychology in the context of National Socialism's crimes against humanity. The use of psychological testing in the area of "child euthanasia" is of particularly importance here. Thanks to the availability of new archive material, it is now possible to examine the prevalence of psychological testing in general: for example, the Bühler-Hetzer test – a diagnostic procedure for testing the children's development from infancy to pre-school age – was created at the Department of Psychology at the University of Vienna during the war and operated from there. The organisations that purchased the test can be identified from the institute's accounts. The main customer was the National Socialist People's Welfare service (NSV): "The NSV began to establish a kind of elite welfare system: services and payments should only benefit those who had been classified as worthy of support on the basis of their racial and genetic origins and their psychological development" Psychologists of the period The research study also focuses on the career strategies of the historical actors. As was the case in other disciplines, a variety of political stances and attitudes existed among the university-based representatives of psychology: from convinced Nazis and opportunists, who adapted their levels political activism to different situations, to professors who were known as open opponents of the regime. The case of Hubert Rohracher, for example, is interesting: New archive sources Documents of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG), the National Socialist People's Welfare service (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt NSV) and material from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, USA, are being consulted for the first time for this project. Background information will also be provided by interviews with contemporary witnesses. The results of the FWF project will be made available to both specialist and general audiences for the first time through publication in book form. http://scilog.fwf.ac.at/ End
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