The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 203

papers by Boria Sax and Martin Brüne summarize recent discoveries
about the dark side of Professor Konrad Lorenz. 21 Lorenz, an Austrian,
is widely considered to be the founder of the modern science of animal
behaviour (ethology). His work in this field won a Nobel prize. But we
now know that he was also responsible for helping to formulate some
of the unscientific tenets of Nazi ideology. He advocated a programme
of eugenics whose purpose was to rewild human nature, by stripping
people of what he considered to be the genetic legacy of civilization.
Lorenz sought scientific justifications for Friedrich Nietzsche's attempt
to equate the civilization of humans with the domestication of animals.
In both cases, Lorenz claimed, the result was genetic decline and the
disruption of what Nietzsche celebrated as instinctive behaviour, leading
to social breakdown, degeneracy, indiscriminate breeding, a lack of pat-
riotic enthusiasm and eventual human extinction. He appeared to
endorse the view of the ancient Greeks that, as he put it, 'a handsome
man can never be bad and an ugly man can never be good'. 22 He listed
the physical characteristics which he said were caused by both human
civilization and the domestication of animals - rounded heads, short-
ened limbs, pot bellies - which happened to correspond with popular
Nazi stereotypes of Jewish physiognomy. He coined a term for this sup-
posed transformation: Verhausschweinung , or pig domestication.
Immediately after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria)
in 1938, Lorenz joined the Nazi party. He became a member of its
Office for Race Policy and proposed a programme of eugenics which
exceeded even the scheme overseen by Heinrich Himmler. Lorenz
believed that humans could be bred to meet not only a physical ideal
but also an ethical one. He argued that it was not just those with
'domesticated' physiques who should not be allowed to reproduce, but
also those possessed of 'domesticated' instincts. Those selected for
breeding, on the other hand, would form not just a master race but a
master species of instinctive, wild beings. He advocated the 'extermina-
tion of ethically inferior people' and conducted a study of the children
of marriages between Germans and Poles, which led to those assessed
as genetically deficient being dispatched to concentration camps. 23
His notions of racial purity corresponded to Nazi conceptions of
wildness. By sharp contrast to most European thinking in the nine-
teenth century, Sax explains, the Nazis saw nature not as lawless and