Alice Ricciardi-von Platen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alice Ricciardi-von Platen around 1939

Alice Ricciardi b. Countess von Platen-Hallermund (born April 28, 1910 in Weissenhaus ; † February 23, 2008 in Cortona ) was an Italian doctor and psychoanalyst of German descent. She became known as the author of the book The Killing of the Mentally Ill in Germany , the world's first documentary on the mass murders of the Nazi regime of mentally disturbed people. She lived in Italy from 1967 and became Italy's first group analyst in the 1970s . Together with Michael Hayne and Josef Shaked , she founded the Altaussee training courses of the International Working Group for Group Analysis in 1975 .

life and work

Alice Ricciardi came from the Schleswig-Holstein counts of Platen-Hallermund , whose most famous descendant was the Ansbach writer August Graf von Platen . After her birth in 1910, she grew up on the Weissenhaus estate in Holstein as the youngest of four daughters of Count Carl von Platen-Hallermund (1870-1919) and Elisabeth von Alten (1875-1970). Her father died early. She attended the boarding school of the Schloss Salem School , which was then under the direction of Kurt Hahn . After completing medical studies in Heidelberg in 1934 and the subsequent clinical traineeship in a Berlin children's hospital, she spent the years 1939 and 1940 in Florence and Rome. She then returned to Germany with her son Georg and practiced as a country doctor until 1945 (in Bavaria or Austria, diverging sources ), where she was confronted with the euthanasia campaign but was only able to save a few patients. After the end of the war, she took on a position as a volunteer assistant at the psychosomatic university clinic in Heidelberg with Viktor von Weizsäcker , where she continued her psychotherapeutic training. From December 1946 she was a member of a medical observation commission at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial , and in 1947 she observed the Hadamar Trial in Frankfurt / Main. Then she went - still in 1947 - to Professor Zillich at the St. Getreu mental hospital in Bamberg .

In 1949 Alice von Platen-Hallermund moved to London, where she worked in a psychotherapeutic marriage counseling center - under the supervision of Michael Balint  - and in psychiatric hospitals. She completed her psychoanalytic and group analytical training and became a member of the Group Analytic Society . She met the organizational consultant Augusto Ricciardi (1915–1982), whom she married in 1956 and accompanied to Belgium and Libya. From 1967 she lived and practiced as a psychoanalyst in Rome and Cortona until her death in 2008. Alice Ricciardi's grave is in the Altaussee cemetery .

Karl Brandt , Hitler's representative for the killings of Aktion T4 as part of the so-called "euthanasia", during the verdict in the Nuremberg doctors' trial

Observer at the Nuremberg medical trial

Alice von Platen-Hallermund gained international attention through her work as a member of the observer commission at the Nuremberg Medical Trial . When the American military government announced in 1946 that it would prosecute the inhumane human experiments and the deaths of around a hundred thousand mentally ill patients and bring the doctors responsible to justice, the West German Medical Association sent an observer commission to Nuremberg under the direction of Alexander Mitscherlich . While Mitscherlich's main focus was on human experiments and on legal and political issues in the process, Alice von Platen-Hallermund was particularly concerned with the euthanasia of psychiatric patients. She perceived the murders of mentally ill people as an expression of systemic criminality in which psychiatry was deeply involved and which the entire German medical profession had known about.

"The killing of the mentally ill in Germany"

Alice von Platen-Hallermund's book The Killing of the Mentally Ill in Germany , which dealt with the complicity of German doctors in the National Socialist euthanasia crimes, fared no differently than the documentary volume Medicine Without Humanity published by Mitscherlich and Mielke . Neither book received any echo.

Ricciardi-von Platen reported in retrospect about the mood in the Nuremberg population in 1993: “The Nuremberg population did not want to know anything about the medical process on the grounds that the doctors had not committed any crimes. There was hatred of the non-Nazis, the socialists and exiles. There was no sign of a zero hour. It was devastating. "

In March 1947, Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke gave a first glimpse into the atrocities that became known during the Nuremberg medical trial with the documentation Das Diktat der Menschenver reply. The book, printed with a print run of 25,000, almost completely disappeared from the market without - as planned - being distributed to the German medical profession. In 1960 the authors reissued the book in a revised and expanded version under the title Medicine Without Humanity . Alice von Platen-Hallermund's 1948 book The Killing of the Mentally Ill in Germany experienced a similar fate. Only about 20 copies of the 3,000-piece first edition came into circulation.

New editions 1993 and 2005

The social psychiatrist Klaus Dörner rediscovered Ricciardi's work and initiated a new edition. After the success of the book, Alice Ricciardi-von Platen was appointed President of the Congress on Medicine and Conscience , organized by the IPPNW and chaired by Horst-Eberhard Richter , in which, 50 years after the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, the historical, psychological and ethical aspects of medicine went astray Aspects have been worked up. The congress took place in Nuremberg from October 25th to 27th, 1996; the patron was Rita Süssmuth , President of the German Bundestag.

Quote

“As long as people live, only part of them will conform to the norm of the average person; but life would be colorless and we would be poor in knowledge and knowledge about man and his being if we allowed the 'abnormalities' to be removed without further ado. Especially the mentally ill with the abundance of their visions and inner images put us in the middle of the problem of being human; Our reverence and love should apply to the insane in particular, since they are helplessly abandoned to demons and excluded from human community - even if they are 'closer to the gods', as Norbert von Hellingrath wrote in a speech about Hölderlin's madness. "

- Alice Platen-Hallermund : The killing of the mentally ill in Germany

Honors

Publications

  • Alice Platen-Hallermund: The killing of the mentally ill in Germany. From the German Medical Commission at the American Military Court. Frankfurter Hefte , Frankfurt / Main 1948.
  • Alice Ricciardi-von Platen: The development of group analysis training by the International Working Group for Group Analysis in Altaussee . In: Georg R. Gfäller (Ed.): Group analysis, group dynamics, psychodrama. Sources and traditions - contemporary witnesses report. Dealing with group phenomena in German-speaking countries . Mattes, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-930978-87-3 .
  • The creation of the perfect human being , in: Gerold Becker , Jürgen Zimmer (Hrsg.): Lust and burden of enlightenment. A book on the 80th birthday of Hellmut Becker , Beltz, Weinheim 1993, ISBN 3-407-83130-7 .

literature

  • Stefan Kolb, Horst Seithe (ed.): Medicine and conscience . Mabuse, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-929106-52-3 .
  • Reinhard Schlüter: Life for a humane medicine: Alice Ricciardi-von Platen - psychoanalyst and recorder of the Nuremberg medical trial. Campus , Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39356-8 .
  • Margarethe Seidl: Alice Ricciardi-von Platen 90 years. In: Conflict and solidarity in and between groups (= yearbook for group analysis. Volume 6). Mattes, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-930978-49-0 .
  • Helmut Sörgel: A woman who broke the silence . Honorary Chairwoman of the Congress “Medicine and Conscience” 1996, Alice von Platen; Source see under web links

documentary

  • Hanna Laura Klar: The recorder of horror . About Alice Ricciardi. DigiBeta, color, 80 min. Klar Filmproduktion, Frankfurt a. M. 2007

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Helmut Sörgel: The woman who broke the silence. Dr. Alice Riccardi-von Platen turned 90 yesterday - she was part of the observer commission at the Nuremberg doctors trial. Epilogue in: The killing of the mentally ill in Germany. (2006 edition, first published in the Nürnberger Zeitung on April 29, 2000.)
  2. ↑ Doris Schwarzmann-Schafhauser: "Medicine and Conscience - 50 Years After the Nuremberg Medical Trial" Congress 25. – 27. 10. 1996, Nuremberg. In: Würzburger medical history reports 17, 1998, pp. 569-572.
personal data
SURNAME Ricciardi-von Platen, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ricciardi, Alice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Italian doctor and psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Weissenhaus
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 2008
Place of death Cortona