In March 1916 General Aleksei Alekseevich Brusilov was appointed commander of the Russian Southwest Front. He had been one of the most effective Russian commanders in the summer of 1914, and it was his army that had occupied Lwów in September. During the ‘great retreat’ in the spring of 1915 Brusilov once again proved himself to be able and level-headed. A year later he was seen as the man who was to change the course of the war on the Eastern Front.

In the first years of the war the Russian generals understood that without a huge increase in munitions production Czarism was doomed to fail. The army lacked everything. Only 10 per cent of the new recruits in the spring of 1915 received rifles. In March of that year, as the fighting ended in the Carpathians, Brusilov reported that his regiments were at between 25 and 50 per cent of their original strength.

Mendel did not formulate his findings in the form of a series of laws. This task was left to his followers, who formulated the rules of Mendelian theory in a variety of ways. Following the successful application of Mendelian principles in plant and animal breeding experiments, anthropologists, psychiatrists and genealogists attempted to identify Mendelian patterns also in man. The two scientists who tried most rigorously to introduce Mendelian concepts into their respective fields in the early 1910s – Eugen Fischer (in anthropology) and Ernst Rüdin (in psychiatry) – would later become among the most prominent scientists in the Nazi academic world. Fischer’s work on racial bastardization (hybridization) signaled the path that racial anthropology was to take in future years; Rüdin’s treatise on the Mendelian nature of mental illnesses proved pivotal in shaping later psychiatric thinking. Genealogists tried to similarly devise a genealogical chart that would accord with Mendelian requirements. By the eve of WWI, physical anthropology, psychiatry and genealogy all seemed on the verge of a new Mendelian era.