Antonio Vallejo-Nájera

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera (1889–1960) was a Spanish psychiatrist. He was interested in eugenics and proposed a link between Marxism and intellectual disability, something he sought to prove through experimenting on Republican prisoners. His ideas led to the thefts of many Spanish newborns and young children from their left-wing parents in Francoist Spain; as many as 30,000 children were taken from leftist families and placed with nationalist families. Vallejo-Nájera was rewarded for his assistance during the Spanish Civil War and he became a leading figure in Spanish psychiatry.

Early life 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 Hans Walter Gruhle, Julius Schwalbe and Ernst Kretschmer. 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 Schwalbe 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.

Vallejo-Nájera’s conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of the Spanish was to take away the "red" children from their mothers in places "away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged". By 1943, 12,043 children had been taken from their mothers and handed over to orphanages or Francoist families, but the number of children taken away from their parents may be closer to 30,000. Furthermore, many children evacuated by the Republic to France, England and elsewhere were forced to return against the will of their parents. In some cases birth records were destroyed and the children's names changed in order to prevent any further contact with their parents. Vallejo-Nájera had a direct link to the Francoist regime's organization for war orphans, , through his friend .

Vallejo-Nájera contributed to the justification of the Francoist post-war repression. He said that the "reds" should: "suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all. Some will live in permanent exile... Others will lose their freedom, groaning for years in prisons, purging their crimes with forced work in order to earn their daily bread...". According to Paul Preston the "investigations" of Vallejo-Najera provided the Francoist State with "scientific" arguments in order to "justify their views on the subhuman nature of their adversaries".

Later life When the Civil War ended, Vallejo-Nájera's support for Francoism was rewarded by his appointment as Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Madrid. "He became one of the most influential figures in Spanish Psychiatry and Psychology in the forties and fifties: his name is among the 16 founders of the Spanish Psychological Society."

He died in 1960.