Constitutional medicine was supposed to complement other racial hygienic measures by determining which people were hereditarily healthy and worthy of medical intervention. In Jaensch's view, the physician had the duty to bring healthy hereditary mass to its full maturity. In the mids, Jaensch succeeded in establishing a cooperation with the Nazi welfare organization NS Volkswohlfahrt, for which he assessed children who were to be sent to summer camps. In determining the hereditary value of patients, the institute could rely on the files of the city's health offices which collected data on the hereditary illnesses of Berlin citizens and filed applications for forced sterilizations.
Jaensch participated in the exclusionist practices of the Nazi racial state by writing expert reports for hereditary health courts which decided on the sterilization of people suspected of hereditary illnesses.
- Related Articles?
- ?
- .
But Jaensch also assessed whether borderline children were worthy of public assistance because they could significantly benefit from therapies and social welfare. Two copies of such assessments have survived among the German research council files in the German federal archive.
They are not representative since Jaensch selected them to demonstrate to the DFG that his therapies were promising. He was intellectually about one year behind normal children of his age which was confirmed by the structure of his capillaries as well as a series of psychological tests for perception and memory. Medication, tutoring, and pedagogical encouragement, Jaensch thought, could have a positive effect in his case.
Despite some negative racial traits inclination toward mysticism and libidinous tendencies typical for Eastern Baltic racial traits , the overall prognosis for Richard was encouraging and justified public expenditures. Since his mother had died and his father abandoned him, he lived in an orphanage. While he was a good student, he was childish and emotionally immature and unstable, which Jaensch attributed in part to his difficult upbringing. There were also negative evaluations.
- !
- The Most Important Guide On Dieting And Nutrition For The 21st Century: Reviews Of The Most Popular Dieting Techniques And Nutrition Guides - Past, Present And Future!.
- !
- The Complete Free Kindle Fire Apps For Kids (Free Kindle Fire Apps That Dont Suck Book 2)?
- Faefever (Mackayla Lane Book 3)!
- Up the Corporation! with Nfn Nmi Jones.
- Gift of Wisdom - FULL TEXT EDITION (CHRISTMAS INTANGIBLE GIFTS Book 4).
- .
- !
Of the children, which Jaensch and his co-workers assessed for the NS Volkswohlfahrt in because they were suspected of having hereditary health issues, only about 80 53 percent were judged to be worthy of support. This meant that almost half of the socially disadvantaged children sent to Jaensch were denied benefits from this organization.
Forty-three percent of those rejected were diagnosed as more or less feeble-minded, 14 percent were epileptics, 11 percent came from families with a history of alcoholism, and 9 percent were diagnosed as schizophrenics. Some of these children had only minor physical and psychological problems, but they were nevertheless excluded from NSV summer camps and other benefits because of their family history.
An eight-year-old boy, for example, showed normal development and intelligence. Apart from rickets, frequent colds, and nervousness, he was healthy and a good student. But his mother suffered from epilepsy and was sterilized in , her sister was a psychopath, and a maternal grandfather of the child was an alcoholic. While they thought that such children were not worthy to get support from the NSV, they did not think that they should be deprived entirely of public support.
In their view, raising their health and productivity through constitutional therapy was still cheaper than institutionalized care which could cost the state between and 1, RM per year. Some of them could even reach the same level of work performance as those who were judged hereditarily healthy. To avoid the danger of offspring with bad heredity, Jaensch thought that members of this group could simply be sterilized in accordance with the sterilization law.
Despite Jaensch's success in adapting to the bio-political priorities of Nazism, Jaensch's institute came under considerable pressure during the second half of the s. But this was not pressure from Nazi ideologues who thought that Jaensch's work implied a rejection of hereditary biology and racial hygiene. In fact, it was the ideological watchdog of the university, the NS-Dozentenschaft in which he had played a leadership role, which supported him against criticism from his medical colleagues.
Their efforts can be described in Thomas Gieryn's words as a form of exclusionary boundary work which tried to expel Jaensch's research from the realm of respectable science by disputing its scientific validity and credibility. Jaensch also conflated hereditary and environmental factors in his work, because he was unfamiliar with the methods of hereditary biology, which, in Siebeck's view, should form the basis of modern constitutional research: Under these circumstances, the continued existence of Jaensch's institute could not be justified.
He essentially considered him a charlatan who had no place in a respectable medical institution. Siebeck's intervention was supported by Jaensch's former mentor Gustav von Bergmann. Bergmann seems to have lost patience with his former student because of his neglect of the wider field of internal medicine and his single-minded emphasis on problematic diagnostic techniques such as capillary microscopy.
Ministerialrat Emil Breuer found it preferable to integrate Jaensch's department into another institute once the university had moved into its new quarters. But in June , a delegation from the Reich science ministry visited the institute and was impressed by the originality of its work. It recommended that the institute receive the financial support it needed for its regular operation as a policlinic.
Then the ministry thought about moving it into one of the inner clinics of the university. Despite the harsh criticism from powerful peers within his own institution, Jaensch could continue with his work because he had a powerful supporter: Hitler's physician in the Reich Chancellery Karl Brandt. Jaensch suggested that the Reich Science ministry and Brandt, who oversaw the planning of the new hospital complex, assumed the institute would have to get a prominent space in the new Adolf Hitler University. He demanded a separate building for his institute, including a policlinic with a ward of twenty beds.
In April , Jaensch's institute was taken over by the state, which was a public recognition of Jaensch's work and also eased financial pressures. While Jaensch did not get everything he wanted, this was not because of the resistance of prominent racial hygienists or because his work was considered undesirable for political reasons. Jaensch himself emphasized that any concerns that his work might pose a danger for the dominant racial hygienic paradigm were unfounded and he was keen to show support for the sterilization polices of the regime see the previous section.
While Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, the professor for racial hygiene at Berlin University, had objected to the plans of the Reich science ministry to integrate Jaensch's institute with the Institute of racial biology in the new university, they saw some merit in Jaensch's approach. In this sense all of racial hygiene would also be constitutional medicine. Bergmann and Siebeck attacked the very credibility and validity of Jaensch's research. By contrast, Lenz wanted to have clearly defined boundaries between racial hygiene and other disciplines and he thought that Jaensch's work had little to do with his own.
But Lenz did not dispute the scientific validity of Jaensch's work. In his evaluation of one of Jaensch's applications for a DFG grant, he argued that Jaensch's work was important. But it is less surprising if one considers the shift in research orientation among Nazi Germany's leading racial hygienists and anthropologists from the mids. The new paradigm tried to explain the relationship between genotype and phenotype the characteristics of an organism as shaped by hereditary and environmental factors.
Peristase , as understood by Fischer, included all those environmental factors that contributed to the formation of the human phenotype in utero and after birth which were not directly determined by the genes. But Jaensch did not only have the admittedly sometimes qualified endorsement of some of Nazi Germany's leading racial scientists. Immediately after the war, Jaensch complained about the dominance of hereditary biologists and racial hygienists in the Third Reich. Together with the Nazi party, he claimed, they had made life difficult for him because they suspected that his work emphasized environmental conditions over hereditary factors in human development.
The real story was more complicated. Jaensch's version of constitutional medicine, which emphasized the role of peristatic factors in the arrested development of children with good heredity, had critics among leading medical scientists but also powerful supporters.
Austro-Prussian War
Jaensch and his co-workers actively participated in these discriminatory practices and they potentially exposed children to further racial hygienic sanctions once they classified them as a threat to the hereditary health of the nation. It was not possible to find out whether some of the children and youths assessed by Jaensch were eventually subjected to forced sterilizations.
But Jaensch himself demanded that sterilization should be used to contain threats to the gene pool from hereditarily tainted people, even though he argued that some people who fell into this category could still be turned into productive workers through constitutional therapy. Jaensch certainly subscribed to the utilitarian premises of Nazi medicine, which determined the value of human beings based on their productivity.
The war provided the regime with the opportunity to step up its campaign against people with mental disabilities and move from forced sterilization and institutionalization to mass murder. There is no evidence that Jaensch was either directly or indirectly involved in the euthanasia killings.
His institute, for example, was not part of any of the extensive institutional networks that allowed Kaiser Wilhelm institutes to source pathological specimens from euthanasia victims or concentration camp prisoners for their research. It lies in the involvement of his institute in the everyday discriminatory decisions and processes of a racist society: The fact that the number of Jaensch's policlinic patients grew more than eight times between and was mostly due to the demands from private clients who worried about the health and normalcy of their children.
The fact that Jaensch's work was comfortably embedded in the everyday racial hygienic policies of the Nazi regime, which in their radicalism had no parallel elsewhere, should not obscure that some of the issues addressed by his research were also a prominent concern in other national contexts. After all, there was a reason why an institution like the Rockefeller Foundation gave him considerable support in the late s and early s.
Jaensch also shared with his Yale colleague Arnold Gesell an interest in the signs and stages of healthy child development, even though their methodologies and research approaches were quite different Gesell showed no interest in capillaries. In the United States, philanthropies that supported studies in child development moved away from purely humanitarian concerns to a focus on improving the nation by improving its children. As these interesting parallels show, early twentieth-century research on child development would make for a fascinating transnational story, which could be explored in future research.
Early research for this project was partially funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery project grant DP I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and my colleagues at Monash University who have read and commented on drafts of the article: We do not know whether Gohrbandt pleaded for Jaensch, but if he did his efforts were unsuccessful. Jaensch was arrested in and sent to a Russian internment camp.
Navigation menu
He was released in February and died on April 1. Wallstein, , —90, especially — University of Chicago Press, , chaps. Wallstein, , 7—37, on pp. Dietz, , — Fischer, ; Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt. Continuum, ; Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance. Sabine Schleiermacher; Udo Schagen, eds. Zur Dienstbarkeit medizinischer Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus Paderborn: Nagel and Carsten Timmermann discuss him briefly: Akademie Verlag, , —65, Koelch does not systematically analyze the bio-political and institutional dynamics that made Jaensch's success possible.
Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity , trans. Richard Deveson New York: Hill and Wang, , citation Marhold, , — Handbuch der Arbeitsphysiologie , ed. Georg Thieme, , — On the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for work physiology, see: Theo Plesser and Hans Ulrich Thamer, eds. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Basic Books, , University of Michigan Press, , 8—13 and 48— Philipp Osten, Die Modellanstalt.
Mabuse, , , —63, citation Herta Beck, Leistung und Volksgemeinschaft. Bilanzen und Perspektiven der Forschung , ed. Wallstein, , 24—38, citation Gesichter der Weimarer Republik. Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte Cologne: Akademie-Verlag, , citation Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity Berkeley: University of California Press, , f.
Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men. Cornell University Press, Udo Schagen and Sabine Schleiermacher Berlin: His research was on the influence of thermic stimuli on the blood distribution in the body, hence his interest in the structure of capillaries. Carl Marhold, , 6—46, on 9— Jaensch , 69—, especially 74— Contemporary psychiatrists often used these terms as summary diagnoses for children who were considered impaired or deviant in one way or another. For a discussion of the contemporary use of the term Psychopath , see: Jaensch , 47—68, citation Jaensch , —91, especially pp.
David Meskill, Optimizing the German Workforce. On the use of aptitude testing as technology of rationalization, see: Die industrielle Psychotechnik in der Weimarer Republik Stuttgart: Carl Friedrich Graumann Berlin: Springer, , — Suhrkamp, , and Jaensch , —40, on p. The 68, RM did not include contributions from the Reichswehr which the report could not determine.
Austro-Prussian War - Wikipedia
Oxford University Press, From Waterwheel to Social Control Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, , chap. In the end, Jaensch paid more than 14, RM, in ibid. Yale University Press, , chap. Schmuhl , 38— Macmillan, , — Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics , f. On Rockefeller support for the biomedical sciences in Europe, see William H. Schneider, Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: Indiana University Press, Apart from the assessment of its own officers, the Rockefeller Foundation cited positive remarks about Jaensch's work from Professor George J.
The German Psychiatric Research Institute had an established international reputation, which is why it received the largest grants from the foundation for its participation in a genetic-anthropological survey of the German population. Jaensch's funding was not part of this program. This was the renowned developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. From , he was head of the section for the upbringing of physically and mentally handicapped children in the education ministry Narkompros and professor of developmental and child psychology.
For a concise assessment of his significance, see: Wade Pickren, Donald A. Dewsbury, and Michael Wertheimer London: Taylor and Francis, , —34, especially Princeton University Press, , — Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: University of California Press, , chap. Franz Steiner Verlag, , 32— Since November , the city paid Jaensch's ambulatorium for the counseling and treatment of needy children who were referred by a school doctor. Klinisch-psychophysiologische Untersuchungen Antrag v. Franz Steiner Verlag, , — Sauerbruch also intervened on Jaensch's behalf when Berlin considered cutting its annual financial support of 5, RM.
This was much more than the 22, RM annual operating costs of Jaensch's institute in the early s. On the establishment of Verschuer's institute, see: In the s, Hitler personally granted him altogether 98, RM to cover funding shortages for his institute. Weiss, Nazi Symbiosis , 95, , and f. Ferdinand Enke, , 1—6, especially 5.
Geoffrey Cocks, The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Germany Oxford: Oxford University Press, , 16 and 88f. Bezirksamt Steglitz von Berlin Berlin: Edition Hentrich, , 16—61, citation He also lectured on the topic at Berlin University.
Constitutional Therapy and Clinical Racial Hygiene in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Beck, Leistung und Volksgemeinschaft. Hahn, Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt , , — On the NSV, see: The truth may be more complicated than simply that Bismarck, who famously said that "politics is the art of the possible", initially sought war with Austria or was initially against the idea of going to war with Austria. In , von Roon had implemented several army reforms that ensured that all Prussian citizens were liable to conscription.
Before this date, the size of the army had been fixed by earlier laws that had not taken population growth into account, making conscription inequitable and unpopular for this reason. While some Prussian men remained in the army or the reserves until they were forty years old, about one man in three or even more in some regions where the population had expanded greatly as a result of industrialisation was assigned minimal service in the Landwehr , the home guard. Introducing universal conscription for three years increased the size of the active duty army and provided Prussia with a reserve army equal in size to that which Moltke deployed against Austria.
Had France under Napoleon III attempted to intervene against the Prussians, they could have faced him with equal or superior numbers of troops. Prussian conscript service was one of continuous training and drill, in contrast to the Austrian army where some commanders routinely dismissed infantry conscripts to their homes on permanent leave soon after their induction into the army, retaining only a cadre of long-term soldiers for formal parades and routine duties.
The Prussian army was thus better trained and disciplined than the Austrian army, particularly in the infantry. While Austrian cavalry and artillery were as well-trained as their Prussian counterparts with Austria possessing two elite divisions of heavy cavalry, weapons and tactics had advanced since the Napoleonic Wars and cavalry charges had been rendered obsolete.
The Prussian army was locally based, organized in Kreise military districts, lit.: Most reservists lived close to their regimental depots and could be swiftly mobilized. Austrian policy was to ensure that units were stationed far from home to prevent them from taking part in separatist revolts. Conscripts on leave or reservists recalled to their units during mobilization faced a journey that might take weeks before they could report to their units, making the Austrian mobilization much slower than that of the Prussian Army.
The railway system of Prussia was more extensively developed than that within Austria. Railways made it possible to supply larger numbers of troops than hitherto and allowed the rapid movement of troops within friendly territory. The better Prussian rail network allowed the Prussian army to concentrate more rapidly than the Austrians. Moltke, reviewing his plans to Roon stated, "We have the inestimable advantage of being able to carry our Field Army of , men over five railway lines and of virtually concentrating them in twenty-five days. Austria has only one railway line and it will take her forty-five days to assemble , men.
The Austrian army under Ludwig von Benedek in Bohemia the present-day Czech Republic might previously have been expected to enjoy the advantage of the "central position", by being able to concentrate on successive attacking armies strung out along the frontier, but the quicker Prussian concentration nullified this advantage. By the time the Austrians were fully assembled, they would be unable to concentrate against one Prussian army without having the other two instantly attack their flank and rear, threatening their lines of communication.
Prussian infantry were equipped with the Dreyse needle gun , a bolt-action rifle capable of far more rapid fire than the muzzle-loading Lorenz rifles of the Austrian army. In the Franco-Austrian War of , French troops had taken advantage of the fact that the rifles of the time fired high if sighted for long range. By rapidly closing the range, French troops could come to close quarters without sustaining too many casualties from the Austrian infantry. The Austrian artillery had breech-loading rifled guns, while the Prussian army retained many muzzle-loading smooth bore cannon.
New Krupp breech-loading cannons were only slowly being introduced but the shortcomings of the Austrian army prevented the artillery from being decisive. In , the Prussian economy was rapidly growing, partly as a result of the Zollverein , which gave Prussia an advantage in the war. Prussia could equip its armies with breech-loading rifles and later with new Krupp breech-loading artillery but the Austrian economy was suffering from the effects of the Hungarian Revolution of and the Second Italian War of Independence.
Austria had only one bank, the Creditanstalt and the state was heavily in debt. Historian Christopher Clark wrote that there is little to suggest that Prussia had an overwhelming economic and industrial advantage over Austria and wrote that a larger portion of the Prussian population was engaged in agriculture than in the Austrian population and that Austrian industry could produce the most sophisticated weapons in the war rifled artillery.
The Austro-Prussian War ended quickly and was fought mainly with existing weapons and munitions, which reduced the influence of economic and industrial power relative to politics and military culture. Before the war started both the Austrian and Prussian governments sought to rally allies in Germany.
The proposition grievously offended Frederick William's "legitimist sensibilities" and the monarch joined the Austrians, despite the Hessian Landtag voting for neutrality. The Hanoverian monarch concluded that his kingdom would fall if it were to fight against the Prussian armies. Most of the southern German states sided with Austria against Prussia, even though Austria had declared war. Many of the German princes allied with the Habsburgs principally out of a desire to keep their thrones. The Kingdom of Italy participated in the war with Prussia, because Austria held Venetia and other smaller territories wanted by Italy to complete the process of Italian unification.
In return for Italian aid against Austria, Bismarck agreed not to make a separate peace until Italy had obtained Venetia. Notably, the other foreign powers abstained from this war. French Emperor Napoleon III , who expected a Prussian defeat, chose to remain out of the war to strengthen his negotiating position for territory along the Rhine , while the Russian Empire still bore a grudge against Austria from the Crimean War. The first war between two major continental powers in seven years, it used many of the same technologies as the American Civil War , including railways to concentrate troops during mobilization and telegraphs to enhance long-distance communication.
The Prussian Army used von Dreyse 's breech-loading needle gun , which could be rapidly loaded while the soldier was seeking cover on the ground, whereas the Austrian muzzle-loading rifles could only be loaded slowly, and generally from a standing position. The main campaign of the war occurred in Bohemia. He rapidly mobilized the Prussian army and advanced across the border into Saxony and Bohemia, where the Austrian army was concentrating for an invasion of Silesia.
The Prussian Elbe Army advanced on the Austrian left wing, and the First Army on the center, prematurely; they risked being counter-flanked on their own left. Victory therefore depended on the timely arrival of the Second Army on the left wing. Austria rapidly sought peace after this battle. Except for Saxony, the other German states allied to Austria played little role in the main campaign. Hanover's army defeated Prussia at the Second Battle of Langensalza on 27 June , but, within a few days, they were forced to surrender by superior numbers.
The Austrians were more successful in their war with Italy , defeating the Italians on land at the Battle of Custoza 24 June , and on sea at the Battle of Lissa 20 July. The Prussian peace with Austria forced the Italian government to seek an armistice with Austria on 12 August. In order to prevent "unnecessary bitterness of feeling or desire for revenge" and forestall intervention by France or Russia, Bismarck pushed King William I of Prussia to make peace with the Austrians rapidly, rather than continue the war in hopes of further gains.
This left Prussia free to form the North German Confederation the next year, incorporating all the German states north of the Main River. Prussia chose not to seek Austrian territory for itself, and this made it possible for Prussia and Austria to ally in the future, since Austria felt threatened more by Italian and Pan-Slavic irredentism than by Prussia. The war left Prussia dominant in German politics since Austria was now excluded from Germany and no longer the top German power , and German nationalism would encourage the remaining independent states to ally with Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War in , and then to accede to the crowning of King William of Prussia as German Emperor in The united German states would become one of the most influential of all the European powers.
The war meant the end of the German Confederation. Those states who remained neutral during the conflict took different actions after the Prague treaty:. As a preliminary step, the Ausgleich with Hungary was "rapidly concluded". Beust "persuaded Francis Joseph to accept Magyar demands which he had until then rejected", [19] but Austrian plans fell short of French hopes e.
Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen proposed a plan which required the French army to fight alone for six weeks in order to allow Austrian mobilisation. Napoleon III was not strictly opposed to this in response to a French minister of State's declaration that Italy would never lay its hands on Rome, the Emperor had commented "You know, in politics, one should never say 'never ' " [21] and had made various proposals for resolving the Roman Question , but Pius IX rejected them all. Despite his support for Italian unification, Napoleon could not press the issue for fear of angering Catholics in France.
Raffaele de Cesare, an Italian journalist, political scientist, and author, noted that:. He wished Austria to avenge Sadowa, either by taking part in a military action, or by preventing South Germany from making common cause with Prussia. If he could ensure, through Austrian aid, the neutrality of the South German States in a war against Prussia, he considered himself sure of defeating the Prussian army, and thus would remain arbiter of the European situation.
But when the war suddenly broke out, before anything was concluded, the first unexpected French defeats overthrew all previsions, and raised difficulties for Austria and Italy which prevented them from making common cause with France. The Roman question was the stone tied to Napoleon's feet — that dragged him into the abyss. He never forgot, even in August , a month before Sedan, that he was a sovereign of a Catholic country, that he had been made Emperor, and was supported by the votes of the conservatives and the influence of the clergy; and that it was his supreme duty not to abandon the Pontiff.
For twenty years Napoleon III had been the true sovereign of Rome, where he had many friends and relations Without him the temporal power would never have been reconstituted, nor, being reconstituted, would have endured. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Oil on canvas, This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. August Learn how and when to remove this template message.
Territories annexed by Prussia. Neutral members of the German Confederation.