ERNST RÜDIN (1874 – 1952)

Ernst Rüdin came from St. Gallen in Switzerland. His sister was one of the first women to study medicine and married the racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz in 1890. Rüdin was strongly influenced by him. Rüdin studied medicine in Switzerland, France, Germany and Ireland. He decided to specialise in psychiatry and studied under Eugen Bleuler in Zurich and Emil Kraepelin in Heidelberg. From 1904, he was one of the pioneers of racial hygiene and co-founder of the Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1915, he became an associate professor of psychiatry in Munich. He had been naturalised three years earlier. In 1916, he failed to prove that mental illnesses were hereditary diseases. Rüdin did not marry until he was in his mid-40s. In 1920, Rüdin married his first wife Ida Senger when he was in his mid-40s. She died in 1926, and in 1929 he married her sister Theresia Senger, who from then on raised her niece and stepdaughter Edith as her aunt and stepmother. Three years later, Rüdin became president of the ‘International Federation of Eugenics Organisations’ and, from 1933, commissioner of the Reich Ministry of the Interior for the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenkunde’. He had human experiments carried out during the Second World War. In 1945, his Swiss citizenship was revoked and he was interned. During denazification, he was categorised as a ‘fellow traveller’ and released from internment in 1946.