Ron Leifer:
May I ask a question? I want to ask Tom [Szasz] one question: Would you argue that with the absence of psychiatry, that it would have been difficult to effect the murders that we have heard of today?

Thomas Szasz:
Yes, I would argue that on the basis that only psychiatrists among medical specialists have a long history of having special hospitals in which to deprive people of their .............., which goes back hundreds of years. After all, modern medicine, going back to the famous German, Rudolph Virchow, begins with medical treatment with essentially consensual patients. There are all kinds of medical specialists and the patients are always voluntary patients. Whereas mad-houses - "Irrenhaeuser", whatever you call them – were always full of involuntary patients. In fact, until relatively recently, in the 20th century, you could not get admitted to a mad-house voluntarily. 

When I went to medical school, you could not be in a state mental hospital in Ohio as a voluntary patient. So psychiatrists have had a long history of what we would call "violence" but what they would call "involuntary treatment". And this history is .......... on top of that and it continues, as we have seen. Many of these people – Dr. Gross is a very famous example – had brilliant academic careers in Germany and Austria up until recent years. 

Richard Vatz:
One follow-up question here: If Nazi Germany had lacked psychiatry, would there have been fewer murders?

Thomas Szasz:
Well, that's a speculation which I am in no better position to answer than you or anyone else. 

Ron Leifer:
But there is, Dr. Vatz – if I may intrude in the intervention – there is this thing of note that, unlike the treatment of Jews, the testimony we've heard is about testimony of people who I assume were not all, perhaps not many, Jewish and this was fundamentally a eugenics effort, from which I conclude that psychiatry may indeed have been central to it, since the notion was, that it was a scientific weeding out of "useless eaters". 

Alon Harel:
I just wanted to mention that obviously also many medical doctors who were not psychiatrists who were involved in atrocities in the war. I mean, everybody knows about this. That's important.

Ron Leifer:
I would just like to make an observation, which relates these horror stories from a half a century ago to today, namely that the psychiatrists at the Free University have suppressed this conference or have refused to attend and attempted to change its venue, which is a form of suppression, on the grounds that we are not scientific. Yet all these murders were committed in the name of science.