Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 – 22 October 1952) was a Swiss-born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi, rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming the directorship at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilization and clinical killing of adults and children. Early career Rüdin was born on 19 April 1874 in St. Gall, Switzerland, the son of Conrad Rüdin, a textile salesman. From 1893 until graduating in 1898, he studied medicine in Geneva, Lausanne, Naples, Heidelberg, Berlin, Dublin and Zürich. In 1899, at the Burghölzli in Zürich, Rüdin worked as an assistant to psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia. He completed his PhD, then a psychiatric residency at a prison in Moabit, Berlin. From 1907, Rüdin worked at the University of Munich as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin, the highly influential psychiatrist who had developed the diagnostic split between 'dementia praecox' ('early dementia' – reflecting his pessimistic prognosis – renamed schizophrenia) and 'manic-depressive illness' (including unipolar depression), and who is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatric classification. He became senior lecturer in 1909, as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer. Kraepelin and Rüdin were both ardent advocates of a theory that the German race was becoming overly 'domesticated' and thus degenerating into higher rates of mental illness and other conditions. Fears of degeneration were somewhat common internationally at the time, but the lengths to which Rüdin took them may have been unique, and from the very beginning of his career he made continuous efforts to have his research translate into political action. He also repeatedly drew attention to the financial burden of sick and disabled people. Rüdin developed the concept of "empirical genetic prognosis" of mental disorders. He published influential initial results on the genetics of schizophrenia (known as dementia praecox) in 1916. Rüdin's data did not show a high enough risk in siblings for schizophrenia to be due to a simple recessive gene as he and Kraepelin thought, but he put forward a two-recessive-gene theory to try to account for this. This has been attributed to a "mistaken belief" that just one or a small number of gene variations caused such conditions. Similarly his own large study on mood disorders correctly