Freedom speaks out for civil liberties and human rights. Protests during the 1990s against religious discrimination were covered by Freedom—lending its voice to the disenfranchised.

Freedom‘s first German edition, published in July 1972, struck a nerve in that nation‘s psychiatric establishment with its condemnation of the brain-damaging practices of electro-convulsive therapy and drugs.

Focusing on one of the nation‘s leading “mental health” facilities, Munich‘s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry, Freedom first exposed the roots of its “racial hygiene” ideology, instilled during the Third Reich. Psychiatrist J. Hallervorden, who headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, confessed during the Nuremberg Trials that at the Institute, he used the brains of at least 500 children from victims of the Nazi euthanasia project for his “research”. Up until 1990, these “Hallervorden Collection” brains were stored in the basement of today‘s Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. Only after Freedom‘s broad exposure was this “material”—as psychiatrists described the remains of their victims—properly interred in graveyards across Germany.

Freedom revealed that psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, the Nazi-era head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, had spearheaded the Third Reich‘s eugenics movement, gushing over what he termed Hitler‘s “holy, national and international racial hygiene mission.” In return, Rüdin received an award recognising him as one of the fathers of Nazi ideology. Freedom pointed out what war crimes observers and other news media had long overlooked: When the war ended, Rüdin—as was the case with many of the Nazi psychiatrists—evaded responsibility for his acts. Although his theories and actions had contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, Rüdin merely lost his job when the war ended. Today, as a warning for present and future generations, the unholy brotherhood between psychiatric “science” and Nazi ideology is laid out in even greater depth in books such as The Men Behind Hitler, published by Freedom.

Over the years Freedom has repeatedly turned back attempts to quash its investigative reporting, including constant legal and bureaucratic pressure exercised by political cronies who sought to avoid exposure of their human rights violations and criminal activities.

Case in point: Freedom caught the Federal Ministry for Youth, Family and Health using one psychiatric front group—Action Mentally Ill—to serve as a secret conduit for the relay of funds to “Action for Mental and Psychic Freedom”, another psychiatric front dedicated to suppressing minority religions. After years of legal battles, Freedom‘s researchers were vindicated by a federal court that ruled it unconstitutional for the government to finance such activities against minority religions.

Through such victories, Freedom has helped to safeguard citizens from the chilling effects of proceedings brought by government officials and organisations whose sole motive is to prevent the exposure of their own human rights abuses.

For more than three decades, Freedom has persisted against forces within mental health circles who have sought to silence its reporting of abuses resulting from brutal psychiatric treatments—including electroshock, lobotomies and mind-altering psychiatric drugs—developed by a desperate profession seeking to control patients it cannot help.

Despite the media and governmental backlash that often followed its revelations, Freedom continued to speak out for the civil liberties and human rights for all citizens. When thousands converged on Berlin in 1997 and Frankfurt in 1998 to protest the wholesale discrimination of religious minorities by government leadership at the time, Freedom aggressively covered the events and reported the facts that other media ignored. Soul legend Isaac Hayes best summed up for Freedom the outrage of the many who participated: “I know discrimination when I see it, and it is alive and thriving in Germany.... It will only be through concerted action by people of good will that the situation can change.”

In more than 45 official reports that followed, human rights bodies—including the United Nations‘ Human Rights Committee, the UN Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance, the Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the U.S. State Department—have taken the German government to task for fostering intolerance against minority religious movements.

Included among Freedom‘s investigations into eroding constitutional rights in Germany and other European nations are probes of the current step-up of surveillance and “national security measures” that target law-abiding citizens. It is not without irony that the destabilisation of democracy and its constitutional fundaments is not likely to be brought about by terrorists, but by the very “national security” measures that are supposed to protect democracy and its human rights principles.

Freedom will continue to flush out bigoted elements at work within state and federal government who perpetrate religious and ethnic persecution in Germany. By documenting misconduct and crime in government, Freedom serves as a voice for human rights and tolerance and a catalyst for reform.

And for good cause. As former Federal President Roman Herzog once stated, the maturity of a democracy is best expressed by the quality of its treatment of minorities.