Antonio Vallejo-Nájera

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera (1889–1960) was a Spanish psychiatrist.

Vallejo-Nájera was born in Paredes de Nava in 1889. He studied medicine at the University of Valladolid and joined the army’s sanitary corps in 1910, taking part in the Rif War 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 Nájera promoted in Spain a personal notion of eugenics, 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.

During the Spanish Civil War 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 Republican Army and International Brigades 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".

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