Background
Ernst Rudin was born in St Gallen, Switzerland, on 19 April 1874.
Ernst Rudin was born in St Gallen, Switzerland, on 19 April 1874.
He was co-editor of the Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archive for Racial and Social Biology) founded in 1904 and co-founder of the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (Society for Racial Hygiene), established a year later as the brainchild of Rudin’s close associate, Dr Alfred Plötz.
From 1925 full Professor of Psychology at Basel and Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography and of the Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich from 1928, Rudin was one of the leading German representatives at the First International Congress for Mental Hygiene, held in Washington in 1930, where he stressed the importance of eugenics and the systematic study of heredity. When the Nazis came to power, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, nominated Rudin as his honorary representative on the Board of Directors of two German racial hygiene unions and appointed him to work together with the Ministry on the reconstruction of the German race.
On 16 July 1933 Rudin took over the leadership of the Deutscher Verband für Psychische Hygiene und Rassenhygiene (German Institute for Mental Health and Racial Hygiene) and he was also the chief architect of the ‘Law for the Prevention of Heredity Disease in Posterity’ which was passed two days earlier and took effect from 5 January 1934. Together with Arthur Giitt and Falk Ruttke, Rudin co-authored one of the first authoritative commentaries on this piece of eugenic legislation, Gesetz zur Verhütung Erbkranken Nachwuchses vom 14. Juli 1933 (1934), which analysed the purpose and meaning of the new sterilization law. The legislation covered anyone suffering from a hereditary disease who was considered likely to pass it on to his posterity, persons suffering from innate mental deficiencies, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, hereditary blindness or deafness, severe heredity physical abnormality or even severe alcoholism. The sterilization of such categories, to be determined by specially established eugenic courts, was designed by Rudin to eliminate impure and undesirable elements from the German race.
Reviewing the sterilization laws of the Third Reich in the journal Deutscher Wissenschaftlicher Dienst (29 July 1940), Rudin praised Hitler’s political leadership for having dared to break ‘the terror of the inferior kind of people' by means of ‘racial-hygienic measures'. Two years earlier, Rudin had emphasized that ‘the importance of eugenics has only become known in Germany to all intelligent Germans through the political work of Adolf Hitler, and it was only through him that our more than thirty-year-old dream has become a reality and racial-hygienic principles have been translated into action’. Among the achievements which Rudin proudly claimed for his eugenics movement was the Nuremberg race law, ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’.
On his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939, Rudin was awarded the Goethe Medal for art and science by Hitler and honoured by a telegram from Interior Minister Frick, celebrating him as the ‘meritorious pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich’.
In 1944, when he was seventy, Rudin received a bronze medal bearing the Nazi eagle from Adolf Hitler, who lauded him as the ‘pathfinder in the field of hereditary hygiene’.