Эрнст Рюдин: Швейцарияда туған неміс психиатры және евгеникалық саясаттың идеологы

Swiss born German geneticist
the Swiss slalom canoeist

Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 – 22 October 1952) was a Swiss born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi, rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming the directorship at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilization and clinical killing of adults and children.

Rüdin was born on 19 April 1874 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the son of Conrad Rüdin, a textile salesman. From 1893 until graduating in 1898, he studied medicine in Geneva, Lausanne, Naples, Heidelberg, Berlin, Dublin and Zürich. He became senior lecturer in 1909, as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer. Rüdin's data did not show a high enough risk in siblings for schizophrenia to be due to a simple recessive gene as he and Kraepelin thought, but he put forward a two recessive gene theory to try to account for this. This has been attributed to a "mistaken belief" that just one or a small number of gene variations caused such conditions. Nevertheless, Rüdin pioneered and refined complex techniques for conducting studies of inheritance, was widely cited in the international literature for decades, and is still regarded as "the father of psychiatric genetics". Rüdin was influenced by his then brother in law, and long time friend and colleague, Alfred Ploetz, who was considered the 'father' of racial hygiene and indeed had coined the term in 1895. In 1904, he was appointed co editor in chief of the newly founded Archive for Racial Hygiene and Social Biology, and in 1905 was among the co founders of the German Society for Racial Hygiene (which soon became International), along with Ploetz. He published an article of his own in Archives in 1910, in which he argued that medical care for the mentally ill, alcoholics, epileptics and others was a distortion of natural laws of natural selection, and medicine should help to clean the genetic pool.

In 1917, a new German Institute for Psychiatric Research was established in Munich (known as the DFA in German; renamed the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry after World War II), designed and driven forward by Emil Kraepelin. The Institute incorporated a Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies (known as the GDA in German) – the first in the world specialising in psychiatric genetics – and Rüdin was put in charge by overall director Kraepelin. In 1924, the Institute came under the umbrella of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Rüdin returned to Switzerland in 1925, where he spent three years as full Professor of Psychology and director of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Basel. Rüdin was among the first to write about the "dangers" of hereditary defectives and the supposed value of the Nordic race as "culture creators". In 1930, Rüdin was a leading German representative at the First International Congress for Mental Hygiene, held in Washington, US, arguing for eugenics. From 1935 to 1945, he was President of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists (GDNP), later renamed the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology (DGPPN). The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin's psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered the founding fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia respectively, as well as Franz Josef Kallmann, who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936. From early on, Rüdin had been a 'racial fanatic' for the purity of the 'German people'. However, he was also described in 1988 as "not so much a fanatical Nazi as a fanatical geneticist". His ideas for reducing new cases of schizophrenia would prove a total failure, despite between 73% and 100% of the diagnosed being sterilised or killed.