Antonio Vallejo-Nájera
Encyclopedia
Early life
Vallejo-Nájera was born in Paredes de Nava in 1889. He studied Medicine at the University of ValladolidUniversity of Valladolid
The University of Valladolid is a public university in the city of Valladolid, province of Valladolid, in the autonomous region of Castile-Leon, Spain...
and joined the army’s sanitary corps in 1910, taking part in the Rif War
Rif War
The Rif War, also called the Second Moroccan War, was fought between Spain and the Moroccan Rif Berbers.-Rifian forces:...
between 1912 and 1915. During World War I he was posted to the military department at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin. There he met well-known figures of German Psychiatry such as Gruhle, Schwalb and Kraepelin. He also conducted inspections of prisoner of war concentration camps, an activity for which he was awarded medals by Belgium and France after the war. On returning to Spain he worked at the Ciempozuelos Military Psychiatric Clinic. When the Civil War broke out he was a teacher of Psychiatry in the Military Sanitary Academy.
Vallejo Nágera promoted in Spain a personal notion of eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
, intending to reconcile German doctrines of racial hygiene from authors like Schwalb with the requirements of Catholic moral doctrine, opposed to state-imposed measures of eugenic restriction. He advocated eugamia, a eugenic policy implemented through premarital orientation work based on the biopsychological assessment of a couple’s personality.
Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression.
During the spanish civil warSpanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
he supported the nationalists. In 1938, he set up the Gabinete de Investigaciones Psicológicas de la Inspección de Campos de Concentración de Prisioneros de Guerra (Psychological Research Bureau of Inspection of Prisoner of War Concentration Camps), a center for psychological investigations. The bureau was established near the San Pedro de Cardeña concentration camp and had fourteen clinics in the nationalist zone. Vallejo Najera carried out experiments on female Spanish prisoners and International Brigades
International Brigades
The International Brigades were military units made up of volunteers from different countries, who traveled to Spain to defend the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939....
prisoners to establish "the bio-psychic roots of Marxism" and find the "red gene". For Vallejo Najera, Marxists were genetic retards and Marxism was a mental illness: "A priori, it seems probable that psychopaths of all types would join the Marxist ranks...Since Marxism goes together with social immorality... we presume those fanatics who fought with arms will show schizoid temperaments.".
Vallejo’s conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of the Spanish was to take away the red children from their mothers in places "away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged". By 1943, 12,043 children had been taken from their mothers and handed over to orphanages or Francoist families, but the number of children taken away from their parents may be closet to 30,000. Furthermore, many children evacuated by the Republic to France, England and elsewhere, were forced to return against the will of their parents. In some cases the birth records were destroyed and the children's names changed in order to prevent any further contact with their parents.
Vallejo Najera contributed to the justification of the Francoist post-war repression. He said that the reds should: "suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all. Some will live in permanent exile...Others will lose their freedom, groaning for years in prisons, purging their crimes with forced work in order to earn their daily bread...". According to Paul Preston the investigations of Vallejo-Najera provided the Francoist dictatorship with "scientific" arguments in order to "justify their views on the subhuman nature of their adversaries". According to the Spanish psychiatrist Carlos Castillo del Pino: "For Vallejo Nagera, reds were degenerates and if they were allowed to breed they would enfeeble the Spanish race. Therefore, they had to be exterminated."
Later life
When the Civil War ended, Vallejo was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry at the University of MadridComplutense University of Madrid
The Complutense University of Madrid is a university in Madrid, and one of the oldest universities in the world. It is located on a sprawling campus that occupies the entirety of the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid, with annexes in the district of Somosaguas in the neighboring city of...
. He was one of the founders of the Spanish Psychological Society. He died in 1960.
Further reading
- Vinyes, Ricard; Armengou, Montse; Belis, Ricardo. Los niños perdidos del franquismo. Random House Mondadori. Barcelona. 2003. ISBN 84-9759-908-X