Karl Thums

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Karl Johannes Thums (born April 5, 1904 in Vienna , † November 2, 1976 in St. Pölten ) was an Austrian internist , psychiatrist , neurologist , racial hygienist and a leading figure in the völkisch wing of the Austrian migratory bird .

Life

Study and assistance

Thums studied medicine in Vienna and Berlin between 1922 and 1927 . He heard from Julius Wagner-Jauregg and attended the " Social Hygiene Seminar" of the hygienist Heinrich Reichel . Both academic teachers placed great emphasis on racial hygiene issues . After receiving his doctorate in 1928, Thums worked on the Vienna III. Medical University Clinic with the genetic pathologist Franz Chvostek .

Thums was a staunch National Socialist . In 1931 he joined the NSDAP , the Sturmabteilung (SA) , in which was Oberführer, and the Austrian Legion . In addition, from 1933 he headed a National Socialist cell at the Vienna General Hospital. In December 1933 he went to Germany and, like a number of other Austrian National Socialists, found employment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography . Protected by Ernst Rüdin , he completed his habilitation there in 1939. With the help of his academic teachers, his career thus took a typical course for Austrian racial hygienists, which the historian Thomas Mayer has characterized as “along eugenic networks”.

Professor in Prague during the Nazi era

In 1939 Thums was first a lecturer, in 1940 an associate professor and finally in 1943 a full professor at the German University of Prague . There he headed the Institute for Hereditary and Racial Hygiene until 1945 and in 1943 became a member of the German Academy of Sciences in Prague. In Prague, Thums led the local group of the German Society for Racial Hygiene . In the “ Sudeten German Institute for State and Folk Research ”, Thums and Karl Valentin Müller headed a “Commission for Race and Family Research”, which was supposed to scientifically underpin the occupation policy of assimilation. Thums saw the Commission's tasks in the clan customer and genealogy , the study of "racial nature of the body politic ," the study of "quality of Erbstämme" and in the demographic research to enable the race and population politicians the right conclusions to pull. He emphasized that the war "must also be won biologically". Müller's project on population patterns and Rudolf Hippius ' work on behalf of the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation for the assimilation of the Czechs were accordingly carried out in close cooperation with Thums Institute. As head of the German health department in Prague, he arranged for an order from the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS (RuSHA) in early 1944 that if Czechs had committed sexual intercourse with German women in the German Reich, their relatives would be subjected to a hereditary biological examination in the Reich Protectorate. The historian Detlef Brandes points out that Thums, Lothar Stengel-von Rutkowski and Rudolf Hippius, in view of the looming German defeat in the Second World War, for opportunistic reasons abandoned the Nordic idea of ​​masters and instead “the symphonic interaction of the numerous special qualities” in the struggle for final victory of the individual European races ”.

Thums was also "one of the most important protagonists of the applied National Socialist inheritance and race management both in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and in the Reichsgau Sudetenland ". The historian Michal Šimůnek assumes that patients from the former Kosmanos State Institute in northwestern Bohemia, who were considered particularly interesting, were selected and killed in cooperation with the Thums “Institute for Hereditary and Racial Hygiene” so that their brains can be examined.

Post war career

After the Second World War , Thums first became a medical officer in St. Pölten and consultant neurologist at the city ​​hospital in 1946 . In 1951 he became senior medical officer of the Lower Austrian provincial government . He held fast to his racial hygiene beliefs. In 1960, for example, he demanded that prenatal diagnosis and termination of pregnancy be permitted as "measures of applied human genetics ( eugenics )". Under the title Healthy Heritage, Healthy People , he published an apology for eugenics as hereditary health care in issue 24 of the "Eckartschriften" (Vienna 1968) of the Austrian Landsmannschaft . Together with Alain de Benoist , Arthur R. Jensen , Rolf Kosiek and Edith Zerbin-Rüdin , he became a member of the scientific advisory board and author of the neo-racist journal Neue Anthropologie , which has been published since 1972 and is run by the right-wing extremist Society for Biological Anthropology , headed for many years by Jürgen Rieger , Eugenics and Behavioral Studies.

In addition, Thums, together with Herwigh Rieger and Karl Ursin , devoted himself to maintaining the tradition of the ethnic wing of the Austrian migratory bird. As early as 1926 he founded the Gilde Greif with Ursin and Norbert Gürke in Vienna. Even after the Second World War he played a leading role in the founding of the Austrian Wandervogel, the Guild Greif and the Academic Guild of Austria. 1957 to 1958 he was federal director of the Wandervogel.

Fonts

  • Karl Thums: On the clinic, heredity, development and racial hygiene of congenital cerebral palsy (Littlesches disease). Twin biological examinations in congenital spastic hemi-paraplegia and diplegia; (Twin neurological studies, Part 3). Zugl .: Munich, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1939. Springer, Berlin 1939.
  • Karl Thums: The German part in the development of medicine. 1940.
  • Karl Thums: Healthy heritage - healthy people. The science of hereditary health care. Austrian Landsmannschaft, Vienna 1968.
  • Karl Ursin and Karl Thums: The Austrian Wandering Bird. In: Gerhard Ziemer and Hans Wolf (eds.). Wandervogel and Freideutsche Jugend. Voggenreiter, Bad Godesberg 1961, pp. 294–326.

literature

  • Michal Šimůnek: An Austrian race hygienist between Vienna, Munich and Prague. Karl Thums (1904–1976). In: Gerhard Baader, Veronika Hofer and Thomas Mayer (eds.): Eugenics in Austria. Biopolitical structures from 1900–1945. Czernin, Vienna 2007, ISBN 3-7076-0215-X , pp. 393-417.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 220.
  2. ^ Thomas Mayer (Vienna): Eugenic networks in Austria in the interwar period . Lecture at the conference “How National Socialist is Eugenics?” Basel, February 17 and 18, 2006.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. 2001, p. 220.
  4. ^ Ota Konrád: The Sudeten German Institute for State and Folk Research 1940-1945. "Scientific thoroughness and völkisch obligation." In: Stefan Albrecht (Ed.). The "Sudeten German Historiography" 1918–1960. On the prehistory and establishment of the Historical Commission of the Sudetenland; Lectures at the conference of the Historical Commission for the Bohemian Lands (formerly: the Sudetenland) in Brno from October 1st to 2nd, 2004 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58374-8 ( Publications of the Collegium Carolinum , Vol. 114), pp. 71-95, here pp. 89-90.
  5. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation as an example of National Socialist science policy in the Protectorate. In: Christiane Brenner (ed.). History of the Bohemian Lands in the 20th Century. Scientific traditions - institutions - discourses; Lectures at the meetings of the Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee from November 21 to 23, 2003 and from November 12 to 14, 2004. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57990-1 ( Bad Wiesseer Meetings of the Collegium Carolinum , Vol. 28), pp. 157-176, here pp. 167, 173-174.
  6. ↑ Detlef Brandes : "Umvolkung, Umsiedlung, racial inventory": Nazi "Volkstumsppolitik" in the Bohemian countries . Oldenbourg, Munich 2012 ISBN 978-3-486-71242-1 , p. 183, fn. 16.
  7. ^ Memorandum on the meeting between Hippius, Thums and Stengel v. Rutkowski on March 29, 1945, quoted by: Detlef Brandes: “Umvolkung, Umsiedlung, racial inventory”: NS “Volkstumsppolitik” in the Bohemian countries . Oldenbourg, Munich 2012, p. 233.
  8. ↑ Michal Šimůnek: Camouflaged - Blurred - Forgotten. The life courses of Prof. Dr. Franz Xaver Lucksch and Prof. Dr. med. Carl Gottlieb Bennholdt-Thomsen in the context of the Nazi euthanasia carried out on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In: Karen Bayer (Ed.). Universities and colleges during National Socialism and in the early post-war period. Steiner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08175-5 , pp. 125-146, here pp. 130-136, cit. Pp. 134-135.
  9. ^ Maria A. Wolf: Eugenic reason. Interventions in reproductive culture by medicine 1900–2000. Böhlau, Vienna 2008, ISBN 3-205-77761-1 , p. 537.
  10. ↑ Helmut Kellershohn: In "Service to the National Socialist Revolution". The German guild and their relationship to National Socialism. In: Yearbook of the Archives of the German Youth Movement 19, 2004, pp. 255–292 ( PDF ).
personal data
SURNAME Thums, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thums, Karl Johannes (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian doctor, psychiatrist and racial hygienist
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 2nd November 1976
Place of death St. Polten