Ernst Rudin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin (born April 19, 1874 in St. Gallen , † October 22, 1952 in Munich ) was a Swiss - German psychiatrist , human geneticist and racial hygienist .

Life

Ernst Rüdin was born the son of a teacher and later a textile merchant. He had three older sisters; the middle one was one of the first women in Switzerland to study medicine : Pauline (1866–1942). She married the racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz in 1890 . Even at high school, Rüdin turned to racial hygiene and the abstinence movement under the influence of his brother-in-law and the role model of the psychiatrist Auguste Forel . From 1893 to 1898 he studied medicine at the universities of Geneva , Lausanne , Naples , Heidelberg , Berlin , Dublin and Zurich . In 1898 he passed the state examination. In 1899 he became an assistant at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Zurich (Burghölzli) under Eugen Bleuler . In 1900 he went to Heidelberg as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin for a year . He then returned to Zurich, where in 1901 he was awarded a doctorate degree with the work “On the clinical forms of prison psychoses” that he had written in Heidelberg. med. received his doctorate. He then moved to Berlin, where, after neurological work under Hermann Oppenheim , he completed a traineeship at the observation department of the Moabit prison . Since 1903, Rüdin advocated state intervention in reproduction from a eugenic point of view. In 1904 he was co-founder and from 1905 to 1907 full-time editor of the archive for race and social biology published by Ploetz . In 1905 he was one of the founding members of the Society for Racial Hygiene, presided over by Ploetz .

In 1907 he went Kraepelin following to Munich, where he was in 1909 with the writing "On the clinical forms of mental disorders in to lifelong imprisonment convicted" of psychiatry habilitated . In the same year he was promoted to senior physician. In 1912 he was naturalized in Germany.

In 1915 he was appointed associate professor of psychiatry.

In the study "On the inheritance and new emergence of dementia Praecox" (1916), Rüdin developed the statistical method of "empirical genetic prognosis", with which he became scientifically known. In doing so, he resorted to methodological preparatory work by the medical statistician Wilhelm Weinberg .

When Kraepelin founded the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich in 1917 , Rüdin took over the management of the “Genealogical-Demographic Department”, which soon became an internationally recognized center for psychiatric-genetic research. In the last months of the First World War and after the end of the Munich Soviet Republic , he examined some revolutionaries, whom he devalued according to psychopathological criteria, while he attributed "no signs of mental illness" to the Count of Arco-Valley, who shot the Bavarian Prime Minister in 1919 . In 1925 Rüdin took over the chair for psychiatry at the University of Basel , which was connected to the management of the Friedmatt sanatorium , but continued to manage his department in Munich. Since he was unable to continue his psychiatric-genetic research in Basel to the extent he had hoped for, he returned to the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in 1928, two years after Kraepelin's death. In 1931 he became managing director of the research institute; the research institute was included in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1924 as the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry" .

In 1932 Rüdin was elected President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations to succeed Charles Davenport ; In 1936 he was succeeded by Torsten Sjögren as chairman of this international association.

After the National Socialists came to power , the new rulers worked closely with the renowned scientist Rüdin and with z. B. Robert Ritter . As chairman of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists, Rüdin was "one of the most important legitimators of the National Socialist health and science policy". His department at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry was supported with funds from the Reich Chancellery . In 1933 he became chairman of the working group for racial hygiene and racial policy of the expert advisory board for racial and population policy at the Reich Minister of the Interior . The “ Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring ” of July 14, 1933, with which “biologically inferior genetic material” was to be eliminated by forced sterilization , was based, among other things, on Rüdin's “hereditary prognoses”. On behalf of the Reich government, he wrote the official commentary on the law together with Arthur Gütt and Falk Ruttke . In it he described the law as "the most humane act of mankind".

Title page by: Arthur Gütt / Ernst Rüdin / Falk Ruttke: Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases Offspring of July 14, 1933 . Munich 1934.

In 1934, Rüdin became an assessor at the Hereditary Health Higher Court in Munich. In 1935, on the basis of a recommendation by Ernst Rüdin, Robert Ritter received the order from the Reich Health Office to “carry out a thorough racial record and inspection of all gypsies and mixed gypsies”. From 1936 to 1944 he was acting head of the Institute for Racial Hygiene in Munich, of which Lothar G. Tirala was previously director. In 1937 Rüdin became a member of the NSDAP ; he also joined other Nazi organizations, such as the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV), the Reich Air Protection Association and the NS Lecturer Association . In 1939, Adolf Hitler awarded him the Goethe Medal for Art and Science . During the Second World War , Rüdin and Fritz Roeder carried out studies on the chemical behavior of the brain parenchyma and the liquor system in the event of a lack of oxygen on behalf of the Luftwaffe , based on human experiments.

In 1943, when Rüdin was already aware that “racial hygiene” was the cover name for the murderous acts of the Nazi regime, he wrote in the Archive for Racial and Social Biology that it was “the immortal historical merit of Adolf Hitler and his followers to have dared to take the first pioneering and decisive step towards an ingenious act of racial hygiene in and on the German people, beyond purely scientific findings ”.

In 1945 he was deprived of his Swiss citizenship . The US military government removed Rüdin from his position and interned him in the fall of 1945. In the denazification process that followed, he was classified as a “minor offender” and, after a probationary period, as a “fellow traveler”. He was released in 1946 after Max Planck had campaigned for him. When Rüdin died in 1952, the obituary from the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry stated that Rüdin was "one of the most outstanding founders of genetic research in psychiatry".

Ernst Rüdin was married twice. In 1920 he married Ida Editha "Itha" Senger, daughter of the high school principal Joseph Senger. After his wife died in 1926, he married her sister Theresia Ida "Resa" Senger in 1929. From his first marriage he had a daughter, Edith Zerbin-Rüdin (1921-2015), who also became a psychiatrist and human geneticist.

Awards and honors

Fonts

Monographs:

  • About the clinical forms of prison psychosis. Berlin 1901 (dissertation, University of Zurich, 1901).
  • About the clinical forms of mental disorders in prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment. Wolf, Munich 1909 (habilitation thesis, University of Munich, 1909).
  • On the inheritance and emergence of dementia praecox (= studies on heredity and development of mental disorders. Vol. 1). Springer, Berlin 1916.
  • with Arthur Gütt and Falk Ruttke : Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring of July 14, 1933, with an extract from the law against dangerous habitual criminals. Edited and explained. Lehmann , Munich 1934; 2nd edition, together with the ordinance of December 5, 1933 on the implementation of the law, excerpt from the law against dangerous habitual criminals and on measures of security and reform of November 24, 1933, ibid. 1936.
  • Racial hygiene in the Volkish State. Facts and guidelines. Lehmann, Munich 1934; 2nd, revised edition 1936.

Essays:

  • Hereditary-biological-psychiatric issues. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry . Vol. 108 (1927), H. 1/3, pp. 274-297.
  • Psychiatric indication for sterilization In: The coming gender. Journal of Eugenics. Vol. 5 (1929), H. 3.
  • The importance of eugenics and genetics for mental hygiene. In: Journal of Mental Hygiene. Vol. 3 (1930), pp. 133-147.
  • On causes of endemic goiter and cretinism. In: Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift . 1930, no.25
  • Empirical genetic prognosis. Lecture given at the 22nd Annual General Meeting of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society on May 23, 1933 in Berlin. In: Archives for Racial and Social Biology . Vol. 27 (1933), H. 3, pp. 271-283.
  • Eugenics of mental disorders. In: Congrès international de la population, Paris, 1937. Vol. 7: Problèmes qualitatifs de la population. Hermann, Paris 1938, p. 206-214.

Editorships:

  • with Max von Gruber : reproduction, inheritance, racial hygiene. Illustrated guide through the Racial Hygiene group at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. Lehmann, Munich 1911; 2nd, supplemented and improved edition 1911.
  • Studies on heredity and development of mental disorders (= monographs from the entire field of neurology and psychiatry ). Springer, Berlin 1916–1939.
    • Vol. 1: Ernst Rüdin: On the inheritance and emergence of new dementia praecox. 1916.
    • Vol. 2: Hermann Hoffmann : The progeny in endogenous psychoses. 1921.
    • Vol. 3: Josef Lothar Entres : On the clinic and inheritance of Huntington's chorea. 1921.
    • Vol. 4: Eugen Kahn : Schizoid and schizophrenia in inheritance. Contribution to the hereditary relations of schizophrenia and schizoid with special consideration of the progeny of schizophrenic married couples. 1923.
    • Vol. 5: Friedrich Stumpfl : Hereditary disposition and crime. Characterological and psychiatric clan examinations. 1935.
    • Vol. 6: Karl Thums : On the clinic, heredity, emergence and racial hygiene of congenital cerebral palsy (Little's disease). 1939.
  • Heredity and Racial Hygiene in the Volkish State. Facts and guidelines. Lehmann, Munich 1934 - 22 articles, including contributions by W. Schultze , Th. Mollison , F. Burgdörfer , F. Ruttke , Arthur Gütt , E. Rüdin and E. Kretschmer .
  • Arthur Gütt (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Erbkrankheiten. Edited by Ernst Rüdin. 6 volumes. Thieme, Leipzig 1937–1942.

literature

  • Peter Emil Becker: Paths to the Third Reich. 2 volumes. Thieme, Stuttgart.
    • Volume 1: On the history of racial hygiene. 1988, ISBN 3-13-716901-1 (therein Ernst Rüdin. Psychiatrie und Rassenhygiene. Pp. 122-133).
    • Volume 2: Social Darwinism, Racism, Anti-Semitism and Völkischer Thought. 1990, ISBN 3-13-736901-0 .
  • Dirk Blasius : The “Masquerade of Evil”. Psychiatric research during the Nazi era. In: Medicine and health policy in the Nazi era (= series of quarterly issues for contemporary history. Special issue). Edited by Norbert Frei . Oldenbourg, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-486-64534-X , pp. 265-285, here: pp. 271-280.
  • Thomas Haenel: On the history of psychiatry. Thoughts on the general and Basel history of psychiatry. Birkhäuser, Basel / Boston / Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7643-1356-0
  • Thomas Haenel: Rüdin, Ernst. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  • Hanns Hippius et al .: The Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Munich 1904–2004. Springer, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 978-3-540-64530-6 , pp. 87-90 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 .
  • Matthias M. Weber: Ernst Rüdin, a critical biography. Springer, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-540-57371-2 .
  • Matthias M. Weber:  Rüdin, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 215 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, Kurt Bayertz: Race, Blood and Genes. History of eugenics and racial hygiene in Germany. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1992, ISBN 3-518-28622-6 .
  • Sheila Faith Weiss: "The Sword of Our Science" as a Foreign Policy Weapon. The Political Function of German Geneticists in the International Arena During the Third Reich (= results. Preprints from the research program “History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism” . Issue 22). 2005 ( PDF ; 320 KB).
  • Volker Roelcke : Funding the Scientific Foundations of Race Policies: Ernst Rüdin and the Impact of Career Resources on Psychiatric Genetics, ca 1910–1945, in: Wolfgang U. Eckart (Ed.): Man, Medicine and the State. The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century, results of a conference in 2003 in the Reich President Friedrich Ebert Memorial Heidelberg, Franz Steiner Stuttgart 2006, pp. 73–89.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://geschichte.charite.de/aeik/biografie.php?ID=AEIK00117
  2. ^ Bernhard vom Brocke , Hubert Laitko (Ed.): The Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Society and its institutes. Studies on their history. The Harnack Principle. De Gruyter, Berlin 1996, p. 418 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. ↑ Heidrun Kaupen-Haas , Christian Saller (ed.): Scientific racism. Analysis of continuity in human and natural sciences. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 116 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  4. ^ Matthias M. Weber 2005.
  5. ↑ a b Ernst Klee 2005, p. 513.
  6. ↑ Thomas Huonker : Roma as victims of the Holocaust. In: Tages-Anzeiger . April 28, 1997, accessed March 18, 2016.
  7. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. (Dissertation Würzburg 1995) Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) ISBN 3-88479-932-0 , p. 7.
  8. ↑ Ernst Klee 2005, p. 513, with reference to the source BA R 26 III / 220.
  9. ↑ Dirk Blasius : The "Masquerade of Evil". Psychiatric research during the Nazi era. In: Medicine and Health Policy in the Nazi Era. Edited by Norbert Frei, R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1991 (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history, special issue), ISBN 3-486-64534-X , pp. 265–285; here: p. 272.
  10. ↑ Member entry of Ernst Rüdin at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 23, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Rudin, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-German psychiatrist and racial hygienist
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Gallen
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 1952
Place of death Munich