Theobald Lang (psychiatrist)

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Theobald Maria Michael Lang , also in short form Theo Lang (born July 26, 1898 in Augsburg , † November 25, 1957 in Munich ), was a German psychiatrist , hereditary biologist and racial hygienist . From 1926 he worked at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he researched goiter formation and cretinism . During the Weimar Republic he was heavily involved in the NSDAP and the SA and published on racial hygiene. Lang's further research was the most extensive to date on the hereditary nature of homosexuality . However, they were methodically criticized and contradicted the assumptions prevailing in the Nazi state . Since he had left the Nazi organizations as a supporter of the left wing of the party around Gregor Strasser after the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, Lang was also considered politically unreliable and in 1941 moved to Switzerland . His theses, in which there was again a brief interest after the Second World War , were finally refuted at the end of the 1950s.

Origin, studies and career entry

Theobald Lang was the son of the railway administrator Josef Lang and his wife Therese. In December 1916 he passed the secondary school diploma . As a war volunteer he took part in the First World War and was deployed on the Palestine front. He was released from British captivity in November 1919. He then studied medicine at the University of Munich , graduated in May 1923 with the state examination and was subsequently awarded a Dr. med. PhD . After completing his studies, he could not find a secure employment relationship and earned his living by working as a substitute at hospitals in Munich-Schwabing and Augsburg and at medical practices.

From 1926 he worked for 15 years as a research assistant at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry , where he was in charge of the Bavarian goiter and cretin examination. He examined the question of what role environmental factors or “genetic damage” played in the development of dementia or a tendency to goiter. He carried out systematic measurements of the parallelism of soil and air radioactivity and the strength of the goiter endemic in various Bavarian districts. Lang advocated the thesis that goiter formation, caused by soil radioactivity, is genetic and not a result of iodine deficiency.

Turning to National Socialism

Lang had been a member of the NSDAP since 1923 at the latest and rejoined the party after the nationwide ban when it was re-established in 1925. From 1925 he was also a member of the SA .

Lang rose quickly in the party's hierarchy. He was said to have good contacts with the SA leadership around Ernst Röhm . In 1931 he became the deputy of the Reichsarzt in the staff of the Supreme SA leadership and in 1932 SA senior physician. In 1929 he was one of the founders of the National Socialist Medical Association . He sat on the board of this Nazi organization and temporarily acted as its secretary. In 1932 he took over the deputy chairmanship of the National Socialist Medical Association.

In essays such as National Socialism as a Political Expression of Our Biological Knowledge (1930) and The burden of Judaism with mentally conspicuous people (1932), Lang expressed a radical understanding of science and anti-Semitism . In 1932 he was also in charge of an issue of the National Socialist monthly issue on the subject of " Racial Hygiene ". In this context he exchanged correspondence with Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Boehm . He warned the Reich leadership of the NSDAP against contact with Eugen Fischer and Hermann Muckermann from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics . Lang was close to Gregor Strasser's left wing of the NSDAP . He resigned on January 30, 1933 in the course of the " seizure of power " from the NSDAP and SA and ended his membership in the other Nazi organizations, but remained connected to the National Socialist ideology and continued to maintain contacts with party officials. The background to his resignation was the disappointment that he was not intended for higher functions in the Nazi state.

Of all the scientific staff at the DFA, Lang had already been most clearly active in the Nazi regime during the Weimar Republic . In the institute he was considered to be exceptionally talented.

Research on homosexuality and habilitation

From the mid-1930s, Lang dealt with the etiology of homosexuality . Lang continued Magnus Hirschfeld's intermediate stage model and took on the hypotheses of the biologist Richard Goldschmidt from 1916 on the emergence of intersexuality levels, according to which some homosexual men are intersexes ("conversion males") and thus phenotypically men, but genotypically women. Goldschmidt had developed his hypotheses on the basis of cross-breeding experiments with butterflies and transferred them to humans with reservations.

Lang conducted hereditary and genealogical studies of the families of homosexual men. He assumed that homosexuals were originally girls who had transformed into boys while still in the womb. In his opinion, a retrospective examination of the gender ratio in families of men convicted under Section 175 would show that more boys were born in these families than would have been statistically expected. Using a genetic analysis of the Hamburger and Munich Pink Lists (around 5000 cases according to police files), he succeeded in establishing the statistical results that some homosexuals were "very likely [...] genetic females", but critics pointed out that he had methodological errors. Siegfried Koller, for example, found the methods inadequate. In addition, experts rejected his thesis that homosexuality was genetically determined. Hans Bürger-Prinz, for example, called for a stronger orientation towards physique and criticized the dogma of the endogeneity of homosexuality. The National Socialist persecution of homosexuals was based on the assumption that homosexuality was less hereditary than a disease acquired through seduction. Not unchangeable hereditary disposition, but the value of personality is decisive. The SS-Ahnenerbe asked the Reich Ministry of the Interior to review Lang's scientific work. Commissioned examiners of the Reich Statistical Office and the consulting psychiatrist of the Army Sanitary Inspector Otto Wuth finally found methodical errors in Lang's investigations during this “politically motivated process”.

Lang saw himself increasingly hindered in his research activities and therefore intervened with his superior Ernst Rüdin . He was habilitated in 1938 by Rüdin with a paper about his measurements on the connection between radioactivity and goiter ; However, fundamental differences meant that his employment contract was no longer extended in 1940. In any case, the Munich National Socialist Lecturer Association had objected to the granting of the license to teach because Lang was "politically unreliable". There were more and more arguments between Rüdin and Lang, also because the latter could not promise his assistant a permanent position. A project application by Lang for the "establishment of a physical institute" at the DFA, which he wanted to head himself, failed in 1939. Lang saw his economic existence threatened and was abusive towards Rüdin, so that he was banned from the house. Lang's complaints about Rüdin failed, as did his efforts to find work elsewhere as a research assistant.

Second World War and emigration to Switzerland

Shortly before the start of the Second World War , Lang was drafted into the army as a reserve officer at the end of August 1939 . During a professional stay in South Tyrol in the course of his research on cretinism, he fled to Switzerland in September 1941, where he was recognized as an emigrant. He tried to continue his research there. With the support of the Julius Klaus Foundation under Otto Schlaginhaufen, he also carried out a research project in refugee camps. He wanted to check whether the National Socialist Jewish policy had led to a positive selection among the Jewish refugees. In Switzerland, Lang made contact with the American embassy in 1942 and reported extensively on the murder of the mentally ill as part of " Operation T4 ". He also testified as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg doctors' trial in 1945 , incriminating his former superior Rüdin heavily.

After 1945

In the summer of 1946, Lang moved back to Germany, where, as a former “political emigrant”, he hoped to continue his academic career. However, he did not find a job in the scientific community. For a short time, he was head of the Mainkofen State Hospital . His efforts to cover up his earlier commitment to National Socialism initially failed in several judicial proceedings . It was only in his trial chamber proceedings before the main court in Munich in 1949, in which he portrayed himself as an opponent of Nazi racial hygiene, a political emigrant and a victim of National Socialism, that he was granted resistance by the court. Lang was denazified in September 1949 as "exonerated" (Group 5) .

Lang ran a private practice and worked for the Bavarian State Compensation Office. For a short time, his eugenic studies on homosexuality once again caused a sensation in the English-speaking world, where they were supported by Franz Josef Kallmann from 1952 on . Genetic studies with chromosome examinations according to Maurice Barrès finally refuted Lang's theories in 1955/56. Lang's theory that homosexuality was genetically determined then no longer played a role. Lang committed suicide in Munich on November 25, 1957. Johannes Heinrich Schultz had previously convicted him of unscientificness at the annual meeting of the German Society for Sexual Research . According to Günter Grau , however, there is no evidence that Lang's suicide was caused by the devaluation of his life's work.

Fonts

  • Theo Lang: Results of a seventh series of measurements on the question of the connection between radioactivity and goiter . (= Journal for total neurology and psychiatry. Volume 162, Issue 1/2), Würzburg 1938, DNB 570520835 (habilitation thesis University of Munich, Medical Faculty 1939).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Florian Mildenberger: Theobald Lang. In: Volkmar Sigusch, Günter Grau (Hrsg.): Personal Lexicon of Sexual Research. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt et al. 2009, p. 402.
  2. ^ Florian Mildenberger: Theobald Lang. In: Volkmar Sigusch, Günter Grau (Hrsg.): Personal Lexicon of Sexual Research. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt et al. 2009, pp. 402f.
  3. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 40.
  5. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 356.
  6. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 15 f.
  7. ^ Günter Grau: Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933-1945: Institutions - Competencies - Fields of activity. Berlin 2011, p. 195.
  8. ^ Günter Grau : Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933–1945 . Institutions - competencies - fields of activity. Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-9785-7 , p. 195.
  9. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, zit, p. 25.
  10. ^ A b Florian Mildenberger: Theobald Lang. In: Volkmar Sigusch , Günter Grau (Hrsg.): Personal Lexicon of Sexual Research. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt et al. 2009, p. 403.
  11. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 30; Florian Mildenberger: The discourse on male homosexuality in German medicine from 1880 to today. In: Dominik Groß, Sabine Müller, Jan Steinmetzer (Eds.): Normal - different - sick? Acceptance, stigmatization and pathologization in the context of medicine. MWV, Berlin 2008, p. 97.
  12. ^ Günter Grau : Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933–1945 . Institutions - competencies - fields of activity. Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-9785-7 , pp. 195f.
  13. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 36.
  14. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, zit, p. 26.
  15. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 32.
  16. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 33ff.
  17. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, pp. 16, 32f.
  18. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 39; Florian Mildenberger: "... spoiled in the direction of homosexuality". Psychiatrists, criminal psychologists and coroners on male homosexuality 1850–1970 . Männerschwarm-Verlag, Hamburg 2002, p. 215.
  19. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25.). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, p. 39.
  20. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: Hereditary biological research on homosexuality at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry during the years of National Socialism. On the history of Theo Lang (= research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Results. 25). Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, Berlin 2005, pp. 16, 40.
  21. ^ A b Florian Mildenberger: Theobald Lang. In: Volkmar Sigusch, Günter Grau (Hrsg.): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt et al. 2009, p. 403 f.
  22. ↑ a b Florian Mildenberger: The discourse on male homosexuality in German medicine from 1880 to today. In: Dominik Groß, Sabine Müller, Jan Steinmetzer (Eds.): Normal - different - sick? Acceptance, stigmatization and pathologization in the context of medicine . MWV, Berlin 2008, p. 100.
  23. ^ Günter Grau : Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933-1945 : Institutions - Competencies - Fields of activity. Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-9785-7 , p. 196.
personal data
SURNAME Lang, Theobald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lang, Theobald Maria Michael (full name); Lang, Theo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist, hereditary biologist and racial hygienist
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH augsburg
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1957
Place of death Munich