Ernst Rüdin--a Swiss psychiatrist as the leader of Nazi psychiatry--the final solution as a goal
Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie der Universität zu Köln.
Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr. 1996 Sep;64(9):327-43.
ABSTRACTThe study of work and life of the Swiss-German psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, honoured up to our time as "father of psychiatric genealogy", lead to different views. Rüdin early in his life became a racial fanatic, and as a propagandist for the purity of the "Germanic people" he constantly demanded preventive coercive measures against the reproduction of the mentally ill and other, in the racist's view, undesirable persons. With this objective in mind he started his psychiatric research. The results of Rüdin's monograph about the genetics of dementia precox do not withstand scientific criticism but confirmed his preexisting opinions. They served however as scientific reasoning for the forced sterilisation by the Nazis, for which Rüdin's comments were obligatory. The next step, to the holocaust of the mentally ill and the undesirable, was not only tacitly agreed with by Rüdin. Max Weber, Karl Jaspers and others realised at an early time the dangers arising from racial hygienics and voiced their warnings in a plain language. The surviving victims are still waiting for compensation.H.W. Poll
'Liberal eugenics' (PDF)
Psychiatry in the Third Reich
Scientific racism in Nazi Germany
'The Principle of Procreative Beneficience'
Francis Galton and contemporary eugenics
Gene therapy and performance enhancement
The commercialisation of pre-natal enhancement
Biologising social problems under the banner of eugenics
and further reading
The Good Drug Guide
The Abolitionist Project
The Hedonistic Imperative
The Reproductive Revolution
MDMA: Utopian Pharmacology
Critique of Huxley's Brave New World