Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)

In 1937 Lorenz was awarded the university teaching qualification by the University of Vienna for his research into animal behaviour. After the “Anschluss” in 1938 he joined the Nazi Party and became head of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Königsberg. Starting in 1941 he worked as a military doctor and took part in studies of people classified as “German-Polish Mischlings”. The content of this “research” and its impact have not been sufficiently analysed to date, but the very topic demonstrates an affinity to the Nazi ideology of race. 

Shortly after his return from a prisoner of war camp in 1948, he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute of Behavioural Psychology in Westphalia, Germany. In 1982 he took over as director of the Department of Animal Sociology of the Institute of Comparative Behavioural Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After this he ran the Research Centre for Ethnology. In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1978 he was a central figure in the protests against a planned hydroelectric power station in the Hainburg wetlands.