Die Psychiatrie Im Dienste Der Wehrmacht (Psychiatry in the Service of Military Defense): By Adolf Heidenhain. Leipzig: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1938. 53 pp.

This work purports to be a contribution to military psychiatry. The approach is descriptive and statistical: there is much citation of earlier works on the subject, and little or no original observation is presented. One learns, for example, that the psychopath presents the numerically greatest military-psychiatric problem, that the rural population offers better material for military personnel than the urban population does, that homesickness presents no difficulties for the German soldier (though it may well do so for the soldier of other nations, particularly the French), and similar odds and ends. All of this is very little helpful to the general psychiatrist and of no use whatever to the psychoanalytic reader.

The interesting feature of the work for the present reviewer, as it would probably be for the average non-German reader, is the glimpse that it gives into psychiatry under the Third Reich. The author, now dead, while not stridently National Socialist, gives evidence of having been acquiescent in the present-day political trend and approaches his subject from a definitely totalitarian viewpoint: his concern is with the good of the army; the welfare or, indeed, the problems of the individual soldier are of distinctly secondary concern, if any. While any exhaustive psychiatry