Vienna: Austria’s prestigious Salzburg University posthumously revoked on Thursday the honorary doctorate of Nobel-winning ethnologist and zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) because of his Nazi past.
The university cited the Austrian’s 1938 application to join the Nazi party in which he says that he had “of course always been a National Socialist as a scientist” and that “my life’s work... has been in the service of National Socialist thinking”.
Lorenz won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 together with German Karl von Frisch and the British Nikolaas Tinbergen. Salzburg’s honorary doctorate came in 1983 but his Nazi past was kept quiet at the time, the university said.
This file photo taken on December 10, 1973 shows Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz after receiving his Medecine Nobel Prize during a ceremony in Stockholm. (Photo: AFP)
He became well known for his research into the process of imprinting in birds, whereby chicks bond with the first moving thing they see after leaving the nest -- even, as he showed, goslings with Lorenz himself.
Salzburg University, which last year began looking into the past awarding of degrees, on Thursday also stripped German jurist and former SS member Wolfgang Hefermehl (1906-2001) of his honorary doctorate.
