The Nazi footprint in the first steps of Francoism

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, military doctor and specialist in psychiatry, pictured in 1951 when he was elected Academician of Medicine. EFE (EFE)

The same day that the German troops invaded Poland, Adolf Hitler signed one of the few documents that would directly involve him in the first extermination process led by the Third Reich against a group for purely racial reasons.

The letter, addressed to his personal physician, Karl Brandt, and to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, opened the door over the next two years to the murder of thousands of mental patients from all the asylums and psychiatric centers scattered throughout the country. Germany and Austria.

This order, which would incriminate a large part of the German scientific community made up of doctors, nurses, health personnel and chemists, with the collaboration of the municipal administrations, bore the code name "Aktion T4".

At the end of August 1941, Hitler had to temporarily suspend the program due to protests by the Catholic and Protestant churches, led by Cardinal von Galen, and the suspicions of the patients' relatives, who began to mistrust the justifications and explanations offered on death certificates.

Although in Spain the extermination of those patients in the gas chambers installed in operational centers such as Hartheim or Grafeneck was unknown, on the other hand, the heated debate that had originated in 1933 among the Spanish scientific community the National Socialist legislation that introduced the obligation to sterilize the

(useless lives).

During the Second World War, and unlike the propaganda meddling in the political, economic, social or cultural spheres, the bibliography on the racial question in biological and genetic terms as it was posed in the National Socialist ideology did not have as much influence in Spain. ultraconservative of the forties.

It is worth noting, even so, the volume

of the future Nobel Prize winner in 1973 and discoverer of the language of bees, Karl von Frisch, who would arrive in Spain in 1942 —a few months, therefore, after the cancellation of Aktion T4— by Editorial Labor with the title in Spanish

"The degeneration of the race"

In this book, what stood out above all were those pages in which the Austrian ethologist and professor at the University of Munich attributed the degeneration of the human race to the excessive protection that was made of the mentally deficient, while "the healthy part and valuable of the people" limited their offspring.

Hence, he took sides with a eugenic policy of the geneticist type (enhancement of racially pure marriages, prohibition of racial mixture, compulsory sterilization...) —not behavioral as the one defended by Vallejo-Nágera through premarital advice , which Von Frisch considered insufficient to "avoid evil" -.

Since the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health and the Nuremberg Laws, these measures were protecting the (Aryan) human race against the sick patient, who was a burden and a threat to society.

In the end (remember that the book was published in its first edition in 1936), its author predicted, with a euphemistic language similar to the document that the Führer would sign three years later, the fulfillment of the "dignified deaths" of Aktion T4: " If man ever tries to carry out the suppression of the incapable, he must naturally use methods of humanity.

That phrase resounded in the ears of the high Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchies, who censored Karl von Frisch's book not only for advocating sterilization and euthanasia, but also because it defended the Darwinian theory of the origin of man.

And it is that the religious interference of the Church on (pseudo)scientific matters was not far from the influence that, on the other hand, the national-Catholic ideology exercised in the work of personalities such as Antonio Vallejo-Nágera.

The international situation, with a Third Reich at the peak of its conquests, continued to maintain the flame of analysis and formulation of the concept of race, with Nazism as a reference, among the Spanish intelligentsia and, especially, among its most prominent scientists, doctors and psychiatrists.

In this last aspect,

respectively, were once again confronted through the essays they published in the early 1940s.

Ernst Kretschmer's biotypological theories

In Vallejo-Nágera's production of these years, it is worth highlighting the volume

.

Following in the wake of his books published during the Civil War, the psychiatrist from Palencia continued to address one of his main lines of research: racial degeneration.

As he pointed out in the introduction, his objective was to study the biopsychology of "abnormal" individuals to investigate educational methods that would correct their defects from early childhood.

This included cases of "juvenile intellectual deficiency", excluding "profound degrees of idiocy and imbecibility" that were "ineducable".

In comparison with the Nazi scientific establishment that during the publication of the book was murdering without distinction all those "oligophrenics", "imbecile children", "weak unstable", "weak passives" or "weak active" who were susceptible, according to the author , of “schooling” in special centers,

in National Socialist terms) above the soul, since the personality and mental illnesses of an individual were influenced by different environmental forces: weather, family, school, religious, economic, aesthetic, social, political, etc.

Instead, he advocated a symbiosis between the somatic and the spiritual that would lead him to expose and defend the biotypological theories of Ernst Kretschmer —who came to collaborate with the Nazi regime despite his initial protests in 1933—, in which he established a connection between the body shape and psychological illnesses.

Although Vallejo-Nágera, as a pedagogue and psychiatrist, sought in Kretschmer's three "biotypes" a certain pedagogical orientation to solve the education of "abnormal children and young people", those genetic or biotypological classifications were distorted by the context of the Third Reich to the that he only cared about carrying out a racial biopolitics that justified the extermination of mentally deficients, gypsies, Slavs or Jews.

Far from educational, pedagogical, spiritual or religious postulates, on the contrary, was his partner in eugenic issues, Dr. Misael Bañuelos.

With his most important work of the forties (Current Anthropology of the Spanish),

(racial science) like Count de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, Georges Vacher de Lapouge or Hans FK Günther.

Emulating this last anthropologist in

(Racial Science of the German People, 1922) and his thesis that the physical traits of a race corresponded to a specific character and temperament, Bañuelos dedicated himself to analyzing all kinds of races that coexisted in Spain.

He highlighted the Nordic component - he will put Cervantes as a historical model - whose biotypological features would coincide, both in their physical beauty and in their critical and intellectual superiority, with those of the majority of the "rulers, lords and leaders of all the peoples of the world". worship".

Bañuelos unceremoniously signed up to the Rosenbergian theory that the splendor or decline of nations and empires depended on the amount of Nordic blood their leaders had.

This was found especially among the nobility of Castile, directly responsible for episodes in the history of Spain of strong Germanization such as the presence of the Visigoths, the spirit of the Reconquest or the colonization of America.

However, this Nordic element had been declining since the time of the Habsburgs, affecting the moral and intellectual sphere of national life, to the point where it could be observed that in contemporary Spain the pre-Asian, Jewish and Oriental racial component prevailed.

What that volume could not hide, which drank disorderly from the invertebrate Ortega of Spain or, especially,

of the last José Antonio from “Germanics against Berbers”, was its deplorable racist content: a racism without veils to affirm not only that the racial mixture was detrimental to Aryan purity, but also to reiterate the obligation that countries had to protect the best endowed individuals from a legislation like the German one.

We can conclude that, like the National Socialist ideology, his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

It was its deplorable racist content: an unvarnished racism to affirm not only that racial mixing was detrimental to Aryan purity, but also to reiterate the obligation that countries had to protect the best endowed individuals based on legislation such as the german.

We can conclude that, like the National Socialist ideology, his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

It was its deplorable racist content: an unvarnished racism to affirm not only that racial mixing was detrimental to Aryan purity, but also to reiterate the obligation that countries had to protect the best endowed individuals based on legislation such as the german.

We can conclude that, like the National Socialist ideology, his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

but also to reiterate the obligation that countries had to protect the best endowed individuals based on legislation such as the German one.

We can conclude that, like the National Socialist ideology, his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

but also to reiterate the obligation that countries had to protect the best endowed individuals based on legislation such as the German one.

We can conclude that, like the National Socialist ideology, his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

his biological interpretation of race would not be the only element that would distance him from Vallejo-Nágera's anti-racist Catholicism.

Misael Bañuelos doubted, in the end, the behaviorist eugenics promoted by his colleague, because he said he was sure of the scant influence on the races of the "environment, nutrition, climatic conditions, lifestyle and profession".

Marco da Costa

(Badalona, ​​1976) is a doctor in Spanish Philology.

This excerpt is a preview of his book

, published by the Taurus publishing house on April 30. 

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