On July, 18th, 1936, a faction of the Spanish Army rebelled against the government of the Republic. A Civil War began, which lasted until April 1st, 1939. The conflict quickly gained international dimensions. In intellectual environments, the Spanish Republic’s support for the anti-fascist fight was majority. In the United States of America some groups moved in favour of the Republic, including the League of American Writers, with authors such as Hemingway and Dos Passos, and the Motion Pictures Art Committee, with Joan Crawford, John Ford, King Vidor and Robert Montgomery among its members.

A good example of solidarity from the academic world was the Psychologists’ Committee of the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, in which -among others- Clark L. Hull, T.C. Schneirla and Gordon W. Allport participated. At the A.P.A.’s Minneapolis Convention in 1937, Dr. Edward K. Barsky made a call for solidarity with the Spanish Republic (see Finison, 1977). Barsky was Chief of the American voluntary medical services in Spain and, after the war, headed the aid committee for Spanish Republican refugees.

In military terms, the balance was quite different. Franco enjoyed the support of some 16.000 Germans -military and civil instructors- including a Luftwaffe unit. Fascist Italy provided a total of 75,000 fighters for Franco’s forces, including army and air force units. Franco’s army also used 75,000 African soldiers recruited from Spanish possessions in Morocco, from where Franco began the rebellion (see Thomas, 1976, pp. 1044-1047).

The Republican army mainly relied on Soviet war equipment, which was accompanied by two or three thousand advisors and war technicians. A total of 45,000 foreigners fought on the Republican side. Approximately, 80% were volunteers recruited into the so-called International Brigades. These brigades were comprised of volunteers, the majority of whom had no professional military experience, and were recruited by international anti-fascist organisations, mainly of communist inspiration. The more numerous national groups were French (10,000), German and Austrian (5,000), Polish and Ukrainians (5,000), Italians (3,550), Americans (2,800), British (2,000), Yugoslavians (1,500), Czechs (1,500), Canadians (1,000), Hungarians (1,000) and Scandinavians (1,000), up to a total of 53 nationalities (see Thomas, 1976, p. 1053). Brigade prisoners taken by Franco’s army who escaped immediate execution were interned in concentration camps. The principal camp of this kind was at San Pablo de Cardeña, an abandoned medieval monastery located some 13 km south-east of the city of Burgos.

Living conditions in San Pedro de Cardeña were infra-human, "like a preview of Dachau or Buchenwald" (Eby, 1969, p.254). Even so, international prisoners in the camp were much more fortunate than Spanish prisoners, since it was intended to keep them alive in order to exchange them for Italian prisoners captured by the Republic. This rule had one exception: Italian and German brigadists were treated the most cruelly, and were very often submitted to their authorities only when they were already on the way to execution or the extermination camp. When a small group of Americans who had been exchanged publicly denounced conditions in San Pedro de Cardeña (Dorland, 1938), Franco’s Government stopped the submission of all American prisoners for the remainder of the war. This camp was the principal setting for the activities of the Bureau for Psychological Research, directed by Antonio Vallejo Nágera, chief of the Psychiatric Services of Franco’s army.

Antonio Vallejo Nágera (1889-1960) studied Medicine at the University of Valladolid and joined the army’s sanitary corps in 1910, taking part in the campaigns in Africa 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 had the opportunity to work intensively in the inspection 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 was posted for a short period to Barcelona before being transferred to Madrid, where 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, a post he occupied until 1931.

Vallejo Nágera was strongly influenced by Krestschmer’s biotypologist view of personality, in common with many of his most prestigious Spanish colleagues, such as Sacristán, Lafora or Marañón (see Carpintero, 1994, p.200). During the thirties he 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 therefore advocated eugamia, a eugenic policy implemented through premarital orientation work based on the biopsychological assessment of a couple’s personality.

The psychogenetic thinking framework within which he worked during the Civil War can be evaluated through texts such as Psicopatología de la Conducta Antisocial (Psychopathology of Antisocial Behaviour) (1936), Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y Regeneración de la Raza (Eugenics of Hispanity and Race Regeneration) (1937) and Eugamia (1938a). In these he maintains that where the necessary genetic endowment - a set of intellectual and moral features built into the biopsychological constitution - is lacking, all efforts to produce a spiritually sane man are generally useless, however careful and exhaustive the set of environmental influences acting upon him may be. Vallejo Nágera always denied being a geneticist, ignoring the importance of environmental forces for the improvement of the race, but he systematically underlined the pre-eminence of genetic factors. He considered mistaken a racial policy which promoted the inferior to the detriment of the elect, arguing that efforts should be directed primarily at the coupling of individuals with suitable psychological genotypes for achieving the greatest possible number of exceptionally gifted people. The Civil War appeared to him to present an opportunity to advance in this line, and he even advocated the classification of the population into castes, using the spiritual values demonstrated by each individual during the war as a criterion. It would be erroneous, therefore, to consider Vallejo as a defender of a purely racist thesis. In his writing he uses the term raza (race) in the sense of a spiritual community united by aspects such as language and culture. He mistrusted eugenic legislation in Germany and in some American states, in which he saw the intention to marginalize Jews and Afro-Americans, respectively. His thesis was rather that a careful biopsychological analysis of the population could serve as a guide for a policy of pre-marital classification and orientation that would produce a long-term, slow but sure improvement of the nation’s psychological genotype.

Vallejo Nágera, appointed chief of the Psychiatric Services of Franco’s army during the Civil War, created in 1938 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), whose management he assumed directly. The bureau was established in the city of Burgos, near the San Pedro de Cardeña camp, and working in it with Vallejo were two physicians and one criminologist, whose principal tasks involved the application of tests. It is likely that the idea of creating the bureau and the inspiration for its work did not all come from Vallejo. Surviving brigadists remembered the presence in San Pedro de Cardeña of Gestapo men, who took anthropometric measures and interrogated the prisoners. They also recalled the presence of two German scientists who went to San Pedro "to find out what kind of human being had enlisted in the International Brigades. They had a two-hundred-item questionnaire, in English, German, French and Spanish" (Geiser, 1986 p. 154).

The only documented work of the bureau was a research project directed by Vallejo and generically denoted Biopsiquismo del Fanatismo Marxista (Biopsyche of Marxist fanaticism), developed between 1938 and 1939. Vallejo published a paper describing the characteristics of the project: "we initiated serial research in Marxist individuals, in order to find the potential relationships that might exist between a subject’s biopsychic qualities and political-democratic-communist fanaticism (Vallejo, 1938b, p. 189). The working postulates presented as guidelines for research were: the relationship between a certain biopsychic personality and the constitutional predisposition to Marxism, the high incidence of Marxist fanaticism in the mentally inferior and the presence of antisocial psychopaths in the Marxist masses. Vallejo makes clear that he is excluding from his study mentally-ill psychotics, since he considers that these kinds of mental illness may occur with equal probability in any political group. Psychopaths, though, are included in his research, since he does not consider them as mental patients, but rather as individuals presenting psychic symptoms of a purely quantitative nature which manifest themselves in abnormal reactions of personality.

Subjects in the study are classified in five groups: members of International Brigades who were prisoners in San Pedro de Cardeña; male Spanish prisoners prosecuted for political activities; female Spanish prisoners prosecuted for political activities; Basque separatists; and Catalonian Marxists.

Vallejo designed a methodology consisting in the individual biopsychological exploration of the subjects in each group, according to the following scheme: definition of biotype according to Kretschmer’s abridged Scheme II, drawing up of Kretschmer’s Psychobiogram for each subject, diagnosis of primary temperamental reaction using Neymann-Kohlstedt’s introversion-extroversion test, diagnosis of moral activity using Marston test modified by Emili Mira -chief of the Republican army psychiatric services, and determination of "coeficiente intelectual" (intelligence quotient) (sic) by the Yerkes method (Vallejo, 1938b, p.192). With these instruments Vallejo attempted to assess his subjects’ biotype, primary temperamental reaction (introversion-extroversion), temperament and intelligence.

As regards environmental factors, family and individual financial position, subject’s political and religious instruction and family political and religious environment were investigated as factors in personality formation. Subject’s professional, social and sexual failures are studied, since -for Vallejo- "they come from the disproportion between their attitudes and talents, and their ambitions and expectations; but, in any case, they promote complexes of rancour and resentment which turn into antisocial behaviour" (Vallejo, 1938b, p.194). Data on alcohol addiction, drug addition, and social, sporting, cultural and artistic interests are also evaluated.

Using this information, Vallejo intended to make a diagnosis of subjects’ social personality. Vallejo understood as the "average social personality" that which develops without creating conflicts, without being delinquent, alcoholic, or sexually perverted. He referred to as "innately revolutionary" mystic political schizoids and those subjects who, "induced by their constitutional biopsychic qualities and instinctive tendencies, triggered by rancour and resentment complexes or by failure to achieve their expectations, have a somehow congenital propensity to disturb the existing social order" (Vallejo, 1938b, p.194). He qualifies as social imbeciles those "uneducated, clumsy, suggestible, unspontaneous beings, lacking in initiative, who make up the majority of the gregarious mass of anonymous people" (Vallejo, 1938b, p.194).

Vallejo concludes the presentation of his project with a comment which gives us a clue to the real objective of these studies: "The most interesting social reaction for our study is the socio-political transformation of the Marxist fanatic, possibilities we deduce from the study of the psychobiogram and the psychological reaction to imprisonment (Vallejo, 1938b, p.195). Indeed, in concentration camps a programme of political re-education was rehearsed with Spanish prisoners, in order to try and take advantage of these prisoners by putting them to service in Franco’s army. In this context, it seems likely that Vallejo’s team would have carried out some scientific advisory work on the programme. In the case of international prisoners, it was perhaps Vallejo’s pessimistic conclusions, together with the delicate state of international relations at the time, which caused the programme’s final objective to be discarded. The re-education work in these prisoners was basically confined to obliging them to parade, sing pro-Franco songs and follow a six-week course of religion which no-one passed, and which was thus continually repeated throughout the period of their imprisonment.

Between December 1938 and October 1939 a series of six reports was published with the results obtained in the research. Five of these refer to prisoners from the International Brigades and one to Spanish female prisoners. No other report about Spanish prisoners was published, contrary to what had been announced in the initial project. Each of the five reports on International Brigade members refers to a national group: Hispano-Americans (Vallejo, 1938c), Americans (Vallejo, 1939a), English (Vallejo, 1939b), Portuguese (Vallejo, 1939c), and British (Vallejo, 1939d). All these reports bear the subtitle Biopsychological Research on International Prisoners. Although all the reports have a comparable structure, they are not identical, and it can be observed that the project was not always implemented in a uniform way. For example, the Marston test could not be applied to international prisoners, since it required the testimony of a person closely related to the subject under study. In all the reports several tables are presented with the results of the diagnoses of body shape, introversion-extroversion, temper, intelligence, social personality and observed changes in political attitude in the camp. These tables are usually accompanied by others referring to socio-cultural and biographical topics such as education, individual and family financial status, religious affiliation, sources of political instruction, enlistment motives, attitudes about the army and the native country, socio-professional failures, interests, alcohol consumption, and sexual morality. All the results are expressed in terms of percentages of the total of subjects in the group. The author draws his conclusions on the basis of these data, without applying any formal procedure for statistical comparison. Each report concludes with the evaluation of the change in political attitude within each group of prisoners.

As a representative example of results reported by Vallejo about international brigadists, we present a summary of the data related to American prisoners. They were a group of 72 prisoners belonging to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. We preferentially offer data and comments of psychological interest: biotype, primary temperamental reaction, temper, intelligence, social personality and change in political attitude, omitting most of those related to socio-cultural and ideological characteristics that Vallejo attributes to prisoners, and which nearly always lack scientific argumentation.

Vallejo (1939a) mentions in the introduction some peculiarities of American society which, from his point of view, make the study of this group of 72 prisoners interesting: the difference between the American and European social environments, the tradition of public liberty, "with liberal and democratic tendencies, somewhat fanatical and superstitious" (p.30), the compulsory nature of primary education, the tendency, in every social class, to progress by personal effort and, finally, "that American society represents the extreme side of materialist civilisation and of simplistic social psychology" (p.31). Although Vallejo notes a great racial variety of subjects, he considers that most of them had been under the influence of similar cultural, political and social conditions. We should not forget that Vallejo gave no psychological significance to racial origin.

The analysis of constitutional biopsychological characteristics provides the following results (in percentages):

Vallejo drew some conclusions from these results. He confirmed the expected correlation between body type and temper. He observed a lack of correlation between biotype and primary temperamental reaction according to Neymann-Kohlsted’s test, though he attributed this to the fact that subjects either failed to understand the test questions or answered with no interest. He found a high dominance of degenerative temper, superior to that found in the first report in the series, devoted to Hispano-American prisoners (Vallejo, 1938c). Vallejo noted that culture and intelligence were higher with respect to Hispano-Americans, but "however, they belong to a nation proud to be intelligent and knowledgeable and -although they are not- they succeed in overcoming their low intelligence" (Vallejo, 1939a, p.33).

Reasons for enlistment were also studied, and Vallejo recognised that, despite a minority motivated by personal failure, most of the fighters came to help democracy, and many of them proudly confessed their democratic and anti-fascist ideas and were enthusiastic in defending the Republic. Vallejo deduced that "basically we are up against communistoids, though there are also high percentages of idealist reformists and born revolutionaries" (Vallejo, 1939a, p.37).

These comments linked in with the results obtained by Vallejo in the social personality assessment of the prisoners: 37.50% normal, 22.22% born revolutionaries, 36.11% social imbeciles, 4.16% psychopaths. Vallejo underlined the high percentage of innate revolutionaries and commented that "it also comes as no surprise that there is such a high number of social imbeciles, since the social and cultural environment favours the formation of such a personality type" (Vallejo, 1939a, p.38).

The study was complemented with data on religiousness, patriotic ideas and individual interests. Vallejo observed low religiousness and a high degree of patriotism in American prisoners, annotating that "However, such patriotism totally lacks spirituality...it refers exclusively to enthusiasm for the material values of their native land, and not to historical or cultural values" (Vallejo, 1939a, p.40). Data on personal failure, alcoholism, empathy with the army, suicide ideas and sexual life were also offered. Vallejo highlighted some of these data: the high level of defeated social expectation which augmented affinity with Marxism, the scarce enthusiasm for the army -typical, he said, in any democratic country- and a high degree of sexual licentiousness. Vallejo observed a low tendency to suicide among these prisoners, which he attributed, surprisingly, to the treatment provided in the camp.

The conclusion of these studies was that the possibility of producing a change in political attitude in American prisoners was very low: 79.16% maintained their ideas, 11.11% did not express them, and only 9.72% changed their ideas.

After the report on the American group, a study on Spanish female political prisoners was published (Vallejo y Martínez, 1939). It bore the subtitle Psychological Research on Female Marxist Delinquents. This work shows peculiar characteristics. It is the only published report on Spanish prisoners, even though, in the schedule, three more studies about male prisoners were announced. It was not carried out in San Pedro de Cardeña, but in the prison in the city of Málaga. Finally, it is the only work in which Vallejo shares authorship: with Eduardo M. Martínez, Medical Lieutenant, Director of the Málaga Psychiatric Clinic and head of the prison’s Sanitary Services Dept..

The aim of the study was to draw some conclusions from a personality study in 50 women with severe sentences. The method is similar to that used with international prisoners, but "without the anthropological study of the subjects...which in females has no use given the impurity of the surrounding factors" (Vallejo y Martínez, 1939, p.398). Another difference is that it was possible to apply Marston’s test, since they had access to testimony from subjects’ close relations.

The authors made clear from the beginning their point of view about women’s psychology:

Subjects were fifty women in Málaga prison. Their sentences were: death 66.00%, life imprisonment 20.00%, 20 years 6.00%, 12 years 8.00%. The death sentences were eventually commuted to life imprisonment. The alleged motives for the sentences were: participation in crime 28.00%, cannibalism 10.00% -though Vallejo and Martínez described it as abusing or mocking corpses- political militancy 16.00%, denouncements by others 14.00% and libertarian behaviour 32.00% -described by Vallejo and Martínez as "acting to provoke the mob to demonstrate against fascism, in general by means of verbal propaganda" (Vallejo y Martínez, 1939, p.400-401).

Having disregarded the study of body shape, the authors offered results from the diagnoses of temperament, for which they used the Neymann-Kohlstedt and Marston-Mira tests. The latter test was not used with international prisoners, since the indispensable information from a third person known to the subject under study was not available. It is because of this that there was an absence of neutral temperamental reactions in the results from the women’s group.

Results reported by Vallejo y Martínez were:

Vallejo and Martínez stressed the dominance of introverted primary temperamental reactions and of degenerative temperaments over normal ones. The authors concluded that Spanish Marxism fed on society’s less intelligent people. They also commented on the low educational level of female prisoners, and considered this to contribute to the fact that "simplistic and materialistic ideologies easily take hold in them" (Vallejo y Martínez, 1939, p. 403).

The authors remarked upon the poor financial situation in childhood and youth of the majority of the female prisoners, affirming, however, that hunger among the masses is not the only motive for their behaviour, but that there are genotype as well as phenotype-related factors that induce extremist revolutionary Marxism. They illustrated this with the data from the female prisoners’ social personality evaluation: statistical mean 22.00%, innately revolutionary 26.00%, antisocial psychopath 24.00%, social imbeciles 20.00%, congenitally amoral 8.00%. The authors noted the dominance of abnormal personalities, and attributed this fact to inherited factors (antecedents of psychopathy, mental illness, alcoholism, delinquency, suicide) and to the social influence of close relatives with extreme ideas.

The lack of political instruction in subjects confirms the researchers’ notion that participation in revolutionary activity has motivations other than the purely political. They divided the prisoners into three groups according to the motivations for their political activities:

A series of statistical data about sexual life -including age at loss of virginity-, drug addictions, interests, patriotic ideas, religious ideas, nationalist sentiments, militarism and political attitudes were also presented, with no conclusions relevant to the project’s main objective being drawn. Final data on change of political attitude were: 58.00% persisted in their revolutionary attitude, 34.00% changed their attitude and 8.00% left their attitude undefined.

At the strictly scientific level, the criticisms that can be formulated are evident: the lack of environmental conditions in which subjects’ responses could have a minimum of credibility, the lack of a detailed description of the procedure, arbitrary variations in procedure in some groups, the absence of rigorous statistical comparisons, lack of rigour in the use of terminology and in biopsychological typology... one could even find small arithmetical mistakes in the tables. But more important than the qualitative evaluation of Vallejo’s work is what this study tells us about the adaptation of psychological research to different socio-political contexts. Vallejo’s work probably represents one of the very few documented cases of scientific research aimed at classifying political dissidence within the framework of biopsychological pathologies. Indeed, Vallejo does not consider the political adversary as mentally ill, but as a person with innately inferior and degenerative psychological characteristics, which in certain environmental circumstances will convert him or her into a vigorous defender of certain political positions. Remarkable in this context is the consideration of the woman as a model of potentially degenerative psychological characteristics. Within the sciences of mental health, Vallejo’s study represents a step in the direction of the psycho-social stigmatisation of the political adversary, which would again be manifested -though from different scientific assumptions- with the psychiatrisation of political dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Vallejo’s work demonstrates once more the difficulty of the radical separation of scientific from political psychology and social and sexual stereotypes. In Vallejo’s hands, the instruments of the psychological diagnosis of personality became arms for political propaganda and the diffusion of sexual stereotypes. While a group of American psychologists showed their solidarity with the Republic, based on the belief that fascism and scientific psychology are incompatible, Vallejo broadcast the message that scientific psychology could be put at the service of any ideology, including the totalitarian kind.

When the Civil War ended, Vallejo was soon given the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Madrid, after López-Ibor -who was not conspicuous for his pro-Franco fervour after the war- had been dismissed. Vallejo thus 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.

After World War II, Vallejo, like Franco himself, knew how to adapt to the new international status quo and take advantage of the Cold War political environment. In 1951, both sides conveniently forgetting his previous opinions on the superstitious democratic fanaticism of American society, he was pleased to accept the invitation to collaborate on an American text analysing the psychopathology of international relations (Kisker, 1951: see Carreras, 1986).

A different fate lay in store for the survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Edward K. Barsky, Speaker at the 1937 A.P.A. Convention, was arrested in 1947 for refusing to give information about those who had financed the American medical services in Spain (see Colodny, 1994). The witch-hunts had begun and the freedom of American ex-International Brigade members was in jeopardy -this time in their own country.

The authors would like to thank Helio Carpintero for his comments on an early version of this paper.