Freud's home in Vienna, 19 Berggasse, draped with a swastika after the Anschluss in 1938. (Picture courtesy of the Freud Museum, London)
This site provides a selection of documents and other research materials relating to the role of psychoanalysis and the 'psy' professions in the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany, and in post-war reconstruction. The primary aim of this site is to provide a useful resource for teaching at Birkbeck College, especially for options within the undergraduate History programme and the MA, 'Psychoanalysis, History and Culture'.
Many of these items were located by Daniel Pick whilst researching The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (Oxford University Press, 2012), a study of the wartime encounters between Hess and his doctors, contemporaneous intelligence assessments of Hitler's mind and of a host of other Allied inquiries into the psychic life of the Nazis.
This research was made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and was also supported by Birkbeck College and the International Psychoanalytical Association.
NOTE: Care has been taken to contact and secure permission from the archives concerned and to secure consent from individual copyright holders wherever this was possible. A number of relevant archives could not be included because permission was not forthcoming. Should any copyright holder we have not thus far managed to locate, wish to contact us and request the removal of any material that has been included here, we will act swiftly to consider the matter and take appropriate action. Please contact in the first instance the History, Classics and Archaeology Dept. Office at Birkbeck via s.durno@bbk.ac.uk with any inquiry. This site makes no attempt to provide comprehensive, scholarly coverage of these archives, nor has it always been possible to indicate here the full classification details of the material within them. Details of provenance of many of these key documents are provided in the endnotes to The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind.