The Dark Irony of ECT Use during the Nazi Regime

 July 17, 2025 – Robert Carter

     Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti introduced his “new” electroconvulsive machine to the Royal Medical Academy in Rome in 1938. He hailed it as a “safer” therapy for schizophrenics than insulin shock and the other chemical methods then used to induce the grand mal seizure that was supposed to “cure” schizophrenia.

     Psychiatrists at the time were indoctrinated by the false idea that schizophrenia could be treated by an epileptic seizure, and many embraced Cerletti’s new technology and set about implementing it in their practices, especially on the schizophrenic population of their insane asylums.

     Nazi psychiatrists, however, were not so enthusiastic about ECT’s  potential. They did not seek a cure to schizophrenia. They were working hard on eliminating schizophrenics from their “pure” Aryan race by enforced castration, sterilization and – even more effective – the gassing of those “unworthy of life” through their Aktion T4 program that began in 1939.

     They didn’t want a therapy that might “cure” someone’s behavior if the core problem was in the “chemical  imbalance” of that person’s genes. They just wanted them gone. Between 1939-1941 over 70,000 of the mentally  “deficient” were eliminated in six Nazi killing centers.

     When it became publicly exposed in 1941 that the Aktion T4 program was removing patients from hospitals and institutions and gassing them to death in facilities disguised as shower rooms, the killing of those “unworthy of life” was then done covertly through lethal injection and starvation. These Nazi euthanasia programs then killed another 350,000 individuals by the end of the war.

     There was therefore no rush by the Nazi regime to use these new ECT devices they thought might rehabilitate those genetically defective schizophrenics.

     Dr. Emil Gelny, head of two psychiatric hospitals in Austria, did find a suitable use for these new ECT devices. He had been killing his  “incurable” patients with lethal doses of morphine and barbiturates since 1943, but those drugs were becomingly increasingly difficult to obtain later during the war.

     Then he ran across an ECT machine. By adding two more electrodes to it and increasing the voltage, he created a perfect killing machine. It was easily obtainable, cost effective, and patients only thought they were undergoing a standard medical procedure with it, so they didn’t resist. It is estimated that almost five thousand of Gelny’s  “incurable” patients were killed at his two hospitals by the end of the Third Reich.

     Meanwhile, at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, another use was found for the ECT device. SS  doctors, including the infamous Josef Mengele, had discovered ECT devices could be used to test just how much voltage a human body could withstand before dying. The new ECT machines became treasured devices in their deadly human experimentation on camps’ prisoners.

     Other Nazi concentration camp officials were finding that a few ECT sessions could bring slacking prisoners back into the camps’ work force as “productive” labor, and ECT shocks began being regularly used on prisoners to increase their usefulness by brutally snapping them out of their supposed lethargy with the harsh voltage. Those who did not respond to the electroshocks, however, were just “eliminated” altogether.

     The Nazi regime recognized the potential of these new electroshock devices for what they really were: instruments of torture. Although psychiatrists at that time could only justify as a “therapeutic cure” the brutal shocking of a person with high voltage to induce a grand mal seizure, the death camp psychiatrists used no such therapeutic excuse for their vicious employment of what they saw were obviously only lethal machines.