1888–1960
○ Died
Francoist psychiatrist and eugenicist who branded Marxism a mental illness
In 1938 he tested Republican prisoners and women inmates in search of a “red gene”; his theories justified taking children from leftist parents.
A military doctor and psychiatrist born in Paredes de Nava, Palencia. Inspecting prisoner-of-war camps from the Spanish embassy in Berlin during the First World War, he encountered the German psychiatry of Kraepelin, Kretschmer and others. From 1930 he ran the Ciempozuelos psychiatric clinic. Head of psychiatric services of Franco’s army in the civil war, in 1938 he set up a psychological research bureau that tested International Brigades prisoners and Republican women inmates for “the bio-psychic roots of Marxism”. In Eugenics of Hispanidad and Regeneration of the Race (1937) he called for separating “red” children from their parents. He became professor of psychiatry at the University of Madrid in 1947 and died in 1960.
Also known as: Antonio Vallejo-Nágera
Activities and affiliations
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1910–1936
Military command
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1936–1959
Spanish Nationalists and Franco regimeMain
Science and technology
Related historical events
- 1885–1941.11.06Sexual Reform Movements in Europe and the Reaction of the 1930s (1885–1941)Francoist psychiatristPreached “positive eugenics” and cast Republicans as inferior.
- 1931–1941.11.06Sexual Reform in the Second Spanish Republic and the Francoist Reaction (1931–1941)Head of Nationalist army psychiatryPreached a “eugenics of Hispanidad” and in 1938 sought a “red gene” in Republican prisoners and women inmates.
The “red gene” and the children
Born in Paredes de Nava in Palencia, he studied medicine at the University of Valladolid, joined the army medical corps and served in the Rif War in Morocco. In 1917, as a military attaché at the Spanish embassy in Berlin, he inspected prisoner-of-war camps and heard the lectures of Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer, Hans Walter Gruhle and Gustav Schwalbe, which settled his vocation for psychiatry. Back in Spain he ran the Ciempozuelos psychiatric clinic from 1930. He sought to reconcile German racial hygiene with Catholic doctrine, which rejected state-imposed eugenic restrictions, and advocated eugamia, a premarital selection based on the biopsychological assessment of couples.
Sympathetic to Nazism, he headed the psychiatric services of Franco’s army in the civil war and wrote that the Spanish race had degenerated under the Republic. When Franco, at his request, authorised on 23 August 1938 a psychological research bureau “to investigate the bio-psychic roots of Marxism”, he and a team that included two German advisers tested International Brigades prisoners at San Pedro de Cardeña and 50 Republican women held in Málaga women’s prison, 30 of them awaiting execution, in search of the so-called “red gene”. He explained the “revolutionary criminality” of Republican women by the animal nature of the female psyche and the “marked sadistic nature” released when politics let them “satisfy their latent sexual appetites”.
In Eugenics of Hispanidad and Regeneration of the Race (1937) he advocated a positive eugenics to “multiply the select and let the weak perish”, and in Madness and War he called for separating the children of Marxists from their parents. His theories served to justify the theft of Republican children: as many as 30,000 were taken from leftist families and placed with Nationalist ones. Rewarded for his wartime services, he became a leading figure of Spanish psychiatry, professor of psychiatry at the University of Madrid from 1947 to 1959, and died in Madrid on 25 February 1960. He has been called “the Spanish Mengele”.