Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

title sums it up

the guardian | 04.11.2002 15:50

.

'Marxists are retards'

Recently unearthed documents reveal that Franco's psychiatrist carried out bizarre experiments on members of the International Brigade in 1930s Spain. His aim: to prove that leftwingers are mad. Giles Tremlett reports

Friday November 1, 2002
The Guardian

For dictator General Francisco Franco's chief psychiatrist, Dr Antonio Vallejo Nagera, it must have seemed obvious. If the generalissimo and his fellow right-wing rebels in the Spanish civil war were crusaders for justice, God and the truth, then their leftwing opponents had to be mad, psychotic or at least congenitally subnormal.
At the end of the 1930s, Vallejo decided to prove exactly that. The solution, he decided, lay in an abandoned monastery at San Pedro de Cardena, near Burgos, which had become a makeshift jail for captured volunteers from the pro-republican International Brigades.

It was here, in 1938, that International Brigade members were subjected to a bizarre set of physical and psychological tests in one of the first systematic attempts to put psychiatry to the service of ideology. Sixty-four years later, the results of Vallejo's project to unravel the "biopsyche of Marxist fanaticism" have finally come to light.

Former prisoners at San Pedro de Cardena remember being subjected to up to 200 tests. They were quizzed on their sex lives, and had their heads and noses measured.

"They made us strip and did all these measurements. We supposed they thought it would be useful if the fascists ever invaded Britain," says Bob Doyle, one of the few remaining survivors of a group of 75 British and Irish prisoners tested at the camp. Another, Carl Geiser, the senior ranking American in the jail and a former political commissar to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, recalls: "I was photographed with just a small cloth over my penis."

Two men dressed in civilian clothes went through a long list of questions in a small office before the prisoners were taken outside. It took them several days to survey some 200 British, Irish, American, Canadian, Portuguese and Latin American prisoners.

"An assistant... called out the length, breadth, and depth of his skull, the distance between his eyes, the length of his nose, and described the skin colour, body type, wound scars and disability," Geiser recalled in his 1986 book, Prisoners of the Good Fight. "Each prisoner was instructed to stand in front of a camera for a front and side view, and a close-up of the face. We were now 'scientifically' classified."

The results of Vallejo's tests were published in a military medical journal that languished in Spanish libraries until historian Ricard Vinyes unearthed them for his book, The Lost Children of Franco.

The results would be laughable, if Vallejo had not been a man of influence. At the time of the study, he was the Spanish army's chief psychologist. He went on to become Spain's most important psychiatrist, holding the country's first-ever university chair in the subject, writing dozens of books and taking part in international conferences until his death in 1960.

His conclusions ranged from the sublime to the sinister. The report claimed, for example, that 58%of English prisoners were "single men with sexual experience outside prostitution", that 7% were recruited "by charlatans in Hyde Park", that 17% had signed up in "employment agencies". All (three) Welsh prisoners were "alcoholics", he found.

"A priori, it seems probable that psychopaths of all types would join the Marxist ranks," he reasoned before starting the project. "Since Marxism goes together with social immorality... we presume those fanatics who fought with arms will show schizoid temperaments."

Little surprise, then, that he classified almost a third of the English prisoners as "mental retards". Another third were deemed to be suffering degenerative mental illnesses that were turning them into schizoids, paranoids or psychopaths. Their fall into Marxism was, in turn, exacerbated by the fact that 29% were also considered "social imbeciles".

"Once more we see confirmed that social resentment, frustrated aspirations and envy are the sources of Marxism," he added. "The persistence of the ideological attitude of the English Marxists is the result of their closed minds and lack of culture."

The results, predictably concluding that Marxists really were mad, tell us more about the mindset of those who, with Franco at the helm, would run Spain for the next 40 years than about the British and other men at San Pedro de Cardena. They also reinforced the use of one of Franco's preferred political solutions for his opponents - the firing squad. Those who could not be saved were better dead.

Brigade members still alive today have been astonished to hear of Vallejo's study. They had thought it was visiting Gestapo officers who carried out the tests. It now seems more likely that, if Gestapo men were present, they were sharing their experiments with Vallejo, a fluent German speaker. Whoever it was carrying out the tests, however, the prisoners were pretty clear what they were for. "They wanted to prove we were subnormal," says Geiser.

The prisoners' response was to make a mockery of the tests. Sexual boasting was combined with careful avoidance of anything that might see them shot at dawn the next day.

Life in the prison may have been harsh but the Brigade member's spirits, and convictions, remained unbroken. "It was grim. No windows, just bars. It was cold. There was a stone floor and no bedding. Sanitation was minimal. You'd get a very small loaf of bread once a day, otherwise only beans," Dave Goodman, a British brigade member, told the Guardian shortly before his death last year.

Vallejo decided for himself, wrongly, that all International Brigade members were avowed Marxists. "In the concentration camps, some of us were democrats, anarchists, some were communists... The thing we learned was that we all had to stick together," says Geiser.

The Spanish psychiatrist was a much-decorated army doctor who had served as a military attache in Spain's Berlin embassy. He was in tune with the "advances" of Hitler's nazi psychiatrists, who were already busy sterilising tens of thousands of people deemed threatening to the Aryan gene pool.

Vallejo, too fervent a pro-life Catholic to go to such extremes, had already come up with his own proposals for purifying a Hispanic race that, he claimed, had lost vigour from five centuries of intermingling with Jewish converts to Catholicism. Pre-selection of suitable breeding candidates would, he affirmed in a book called Eugenesia of the Hispanic People and Regeneration of the Race, restore "nobility".

The final conclusions of his study may have helped justify the firing squads that dispatched between 30,000 and 50,000 republican sympathisers, but they will please most of the surviving International Brigade members. Despite the pressures of jail, 85% of them refused to express regret for fighting to save the elected republican government.

"The English subjects have participated much more in the fighting than the Americans, judging by the number of wounded... The immense majority remain firmly attached to their ideas," Dr Vallejo concluded.

the guardian
- e-mail: lmao@funny.net

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech