Demonstration on the Day of Remembrance and Resistance

International Commemoration   
Permanent commemoration: Names of victims 1939 – 1945

Click here for the “Freedom from Fear” tour in 1999 to visit areas where exterminations took place in hospitals located in different parts of Germany. Click here for the international “Foucault Tribunal” which took place on May 2nd 1998 in Berlin. As a reference to this event the R&R Day is on the 2nd of May.

On the occasion of our demonstration march to comemmorate our Day of Remembrance and Resistance beginning at the T 4 memorial and ending at the European Representation centre, this speech was made:

  • We are gathering here for the 29th time.
  • 75 years after the systematic murder in psychiatric institutions came to an end, the world and the World Health Organisation have recognised that psychiatry must be non-violent.
  • This puts the onus on the medical establishment in particular to make non-violent psychiatry part of everyday practice.
  • This joint UN resolution by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the World Health Organisation (WHO) was announced in October of last year. However, the fact that we only realised this with a delay does not dampen our joy.
  • It is now first and foremost the responsibility of the medical profession, which is at the top of the medical hierarchy, to implement this decision immediately.
  • The state or the European Union can accelerate the payment of this debt by amending legal regulations, but doctors want to be responsible and are responsible for their actions, so they must act immediately to avoid turning the entire profession into state-protected criminals.
  • This may sound like a medium-sized revolution, but this is quite simply the world order that has been created since 1948 as a result of the German war of extermination and the systematic mass murders from 1939 to 1949, which began in Germany in the psychiatric wards from this location at Tiergartenstrasse 4.
  •  We should be reminded of the statement by Ernst Klee: It was not the Nazis who needed the doctors, but the doctors who needed the Nazis.

Best regards
rene talbot
(Secretary of IAAPA and member of the board of die-BPE)