In the following newspaper report, phrenologists examine the skulls of executed Lenin Boys and determine that their skulls showed slight signs of degeneracy.
A phrenologist was a practitioner of phrenology, a pseudoscience that claimed to determine personality traits, mental abilities, and character by examining the shape and bumps of a person’s skull. Phrenologists believed that different areas of the brain corresponded to different aspects of personality and that these areas could be assessed by feeling the skull’s surface.
During an examination, they would palpate the skull, measure its contours with calipers, and make observations about the size and prominence of various bumps, associating these with specific traits or tendencies.
Hungarian Reds’ Skulls Examined By Phrenologists
Budapest, July 10, 1921. — Hungarian phrenologists who have made a careful study of the skulls of 30 notorious red terrorists sentenced and hanged after the fall of communism in this country have just reported that “bolshevik terrorists, though exhibiting signs of abnormality, seem not to belong to the type of born degenerate criminals.”
All of the 30 were members of Bela Kun’s fearful bodyguard called the “Lenin boys,” all were found guilty of numerous murders and robberies and examined in their lifetime by the same doctors when under trial.
“The skulls,” runs the report, “are prognathic characterized by an exceptionally low forehead, deep eye-caves, big mouth, sharp protruding paws, deficient dentition. When compared with the skulls of notorious common murderers preserved in the museum of the police they show the signs of degeneracy in a much less degree.
“The only exception is Joseph Cserny, the leader of the group, whose skull is easily the first among the worst and most deformed specimens of human degeneration. When examined during his trial the savage cruel look of his small evasive eyes startled even the professional doctors of crime. Small wonder that the bolshevik dictator of Hungary, Bela Kun, felt afraid of the man and never met the chief of his devoted bodyguard without previously slipping a revolver into his pocket.
“The medical board holds the view that the bolshevik terrorists, though undoubtedly degenerate individuals, would under ordinary circumstances never have committed murder. But their resistance to crime was much weaker than that of the civilized type and when the solid body of law and morality was shaking with revolutionary fever their half-slumbering ferocious instincts roused up and the killed with the savage passion of the neolithic man.”
Source: Great Falls tribune. (Great Falls, Mont.), 31 July 1921.
