Christian von Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the Universität Wien.
Christian von Ehrenfels
Dickinson noted that many of Ehrenfels's ideas seem to anticipate National Socialism, but this was not the case. Within the first decade of the 20th century some of the more radical members of the eugenics-Social Darwinist movement in Germany were already advocating killing the physically and/or mentally disabled as the best way of improving the Aryan race. Ehrenfels was deeply horrified by these ideas, and made it clear that in his proposed new society, the mentally and physically disabled would be prevented from marrying, and this was enough. Had Ehrenfels lived long enough, he would have been appalled by the Action T4 program launched by the German government in January 1939 to exterminate all physically and mentally disabled people in the "Reich" (which by that included Austria). Likewise, Ehrenfels was opposed to antisemitism, writing there was no "Jewish bogey" threatening the "Aryan race"; called antisemitism "silly" and argued that the Jews would be very useful allies for the Aryans in the coming war with the Asians. In this, Ehrenfels parted company with his friend Houston Stewart Chamberlain who believed in the coming great "race war" that the Asians together with the blacks would fight under the leadership of the Jews against the Aryans.