Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Email: michael. The paper examines the history of constitutional therapy in Weimar and Nazi Germany. During the Weimar period, his work received funding from various state agencies as well as the Rockefeller foundation, because it fit well with contemporary approaches in public hygiene and social medicine that emphasized the need to restore the physical and mental health of children and youths.
Jaensch successfully positioned himself as a researcher on the verge of developing new therapies for feeble-minded people, who threatened to become an intolerable burden on the Weimar welfare state.
During the Nazi period, he successfully reinvented himself as a racial hygienist by convincing influential medical leaders that his ideas were a valuable complement to the negative eugenics of Nazi bio-politics. He had established his institute as Ambulatorium for Constitutional Therapy with significant public support during the Weimar Republic and expanded it after with the help of influential figures in the Nazi scientific and political establishment.
Jaensch feared that his success during the Nazi period might become a problem after the war, which is why he felt the need to explain to Gohrbandt his experiences during the Third Reich. He apparently hoped that Gohrbandt, whom he had known for a while, would plead for him with the Soviet occupation authorities in Berlin. The Nazi party, he claimed, had done everything to put a spoke in his wheel. It had undermined his collaboration with municipal welfare offices and tried to close down his institute.
Political ideology threatening, corrupting, or even suppressing scientific approaches that might question or contradict the scientific orthodoxies of the Nazi racial state, was an attractive narrative to a scientist after , in particular if he had been implicated in the racial policies of the regime.
