Scientific racism in Germany

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach | Immanuel Kant | Christoph Meiners | Petrus Camper | Anders Adolf Retzius | Gustav Friedrich Klemm | Carl Gustav Carus | Arthur Schopenhauer | Arthur de Gobineau | Carl Vogt | Ernst Haeckel | Francis Galton | Oscar Peschel | Theodor Pösche | Karl Penka | Ludwig Wilser | Rudolf Virchow | Otto Ammon | Alfred Ploetz | Giuseppe Sergi | Samuel Weissenberg | Joseph Deniker | Houston Stewart Chamberlain | Georges Vacher de Lapouge | Ludwig Woltmann | Rolf Nordenstreng | Fritz Lenz | Hans F. K. Günther | Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß | Ludwig Schemann | Jan Czekanowski | Egon von Eickstedt | Renato Biasutti Scientific racism in Germany Home

The term 'scientific racism'

The term 'scientific racism' refers to the use of science to justify and support racist beliefs. It is used in a critical sense to describe the misuse of science. The term can be found, with this meaning, sporadically in publications as early as in 1942, began to spread in the 1960s, and was greatly popularized by Stephen Jay Gould who used it in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man to describe the historical role of science in propagating the ideal of White racial superiority.

Scientific racism embraces anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, phrenology, physiognomy, ethnology, archaeology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines. What's more, it also pervades geography, folklore studies, history, classics, languages, law, literature, and theology.

Scientific racism proposes two ideas: that race is a biological reality and that human 'races' can be categorized in a hierarchical fashion. Scientific racism rested, as Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen noted in 1972, on two common themes – psychological pathology and intellectual inferiority. In addition, racial inferiority or superiority was also linked to perceptions of physical beauty.

The era of scientific racism

The belief that science can be used to justify racial supremacy has been a problem for more than four centuries, during which it was supported by a long line of Western thinkers. The beginnings of these sorts of beliefs can be found in the seventeen century, from where they carried on until the first half of the twentieth century. Countless anthropologists and ethnologists have publicized the findings of their science for racist political ends, for instance in France at the height of the Dreyfus affair (1898–1906). In the U. S., Samuel Morton (1799–1851), who is still considered to be the originator of 'American School' ethnology, Josiah C. Nott (1804–1873), Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), and George Gliddon (1809–1857) established a 'racist academic consensus' at 'the very epicentre of American academia': in Harvard University. The claim that scientific inquiry confirms an objective hierarchy of mental as well as physical qualities across biologically defined races became strongest after 1900.

Scientific racism in Germany

This book chapter or section is currently under construction.

Racial theory was at the heart of National Socialist ideology. This distinguished it from the ideology of, for example, Italian fascism.

Before 1933

In Germany, scientific racism reached its peak under National Socialism, but was by no means its own invention. A broad racial hygiene movement that wanted to avert a 'degeneration' of the German people with targeted population policy had already existed in the Weimar Republic. As early as 1905, Alfred Ploetz established the German Society for Racial Hygiene in Berlin. In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded; after 1933, personalities such as Eugen Fischer, Otmar von Verschuer and Fritz Lenz worked here.

Racist state practices also existed before 1933. These included, among others:

• the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908.

Scientific institutions 1933–1945

Among the measures taken under National Socialism to promote scientific racism were the establishment of:

• the State Academy for Racial and Health Care in 1934, which was attached to the German Hygiene Museum and served as a research and teaching institution for racial policy propaganda and training;
• propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in 1934/1935, a research center against Judaism, Freemasonry, and liberalism;
• the University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene Frankfurt am Main in 1935, a hereditary biology research institute dedicated to 'hereditary biological inventory' of the inhabitants of Frankfurt and which had model character because it was one of the largest institutions of its kind;
• the SS's Ahnenerbe organization in 1935, which pursued National Socialist cultural policy under the guise of archaeological, anthropological and historical research;
• the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany in 1935, whose main task was the investigation of the 'Jewish question' and for which a branch 'Research Department on the Jewish Question' was created at the University of Munich in 1936; the members included the 'race researchers' Eugen Fischer, Hans F. K. Günther and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer;
• the German Society for Celtic Studies in 1936, an institution within the University of Berlin that was set up to be a contact point between the German Celtologists and the SS;
• the Reich Health Office's Racial Hygiene Research Center in 1936, which collected pseudo-biological data on the Romani people living in the German Reich as well as on concentration camp prisoners and inmates of youth concentration camps;
• the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life in 1939, a cross-church establishment by eleven German Protestant churches that tried to erase the Old Testament from the Christian theology;
• the Advanced School of the NSDAP in 1939/1940, an Nazi elite university that included institutions such as the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (Frankfurt/Main) and the Institute for Biology and Racial Theory (Stuttgart);
• the Reich Foundation for Scientific Research (Reinhard Heydrich Foundation) in 1942, which, under the influence of the SS, dedicated itself to the 'research of the ethnic, cultural, political and economic conditions of Bohemia and Moravia as well as the peoples of Eastern and Southeastern Europe'.

Political institutions and political practice 1933–1945

In addition to the scientific institutions mentioned above, political institutions were also set up in order to put racial ideology into practice. These included, among others, the Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy, established in 1934 as a department of the NSDAP for the purpose of producing propaganda regarding the 'ethnic consciousness' of the 'Nordic Aryan master race'. However, the largest share in the practical implementation of scientific racism was played by the Schutzstaffel (SS), and in particular some of its sub-organizations, such as:

• the Race and Settlement Main Office, established in 1931; in WWII, it took on the task of racial selection of the populations of the occupied territories in Eastern Europe, in connection with the appointment of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (1939) and the elaboration of the Master Plan for the East;

• the Lebensborn, initiated in 1935 by the SS with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of 'racially pure' and 'healthy' 'Aryans'; the organization ran maternity homes where unmarried mothers who were classified as racially impeccable could give birth to their children; during the Second World War, Lebensborn also organized the abduction of 'Aryan'-looking children from families and orphanages in the occupied eastern territories, who were then offered for adoption to qualified German families; the latter was considered a Germanization measure.

With regard to couples or women who met the Nazi standards of racially pure and healthy Aryans, the Nazi state pursued a decidedly pro-natalist population policy. The measures included, among others:

• the introduction of a marriage loan in 1933 for those wishing to marry who met the racial and social quality requirements; repayment could be paid off by having children;

• the reintroduction of §§ 219 and 220 in the Reich Penal Code in 1933, which now criminalized the public announcement, advertising and display of means, objects and procedures for abortion and the public offering of one's own or others' services to promote abortion; this measure was part of a population policy designed to promote pregnancies among women of 'good blood'; children of Jewish women or other undesirable groups, on the other hand, could be aborted without giving reasons;

• the declaration of Mother's Day as a public holiday; celebrated for the first time on the 3rd Sunday of May 1934 as the 'Day of Remembrance and Honor of German Mothers';

• the introduction of child benefit in 1935 for large families with low incomes;

• the foundation of the Cross of Honour of the German Mother in 1938, an honorary medal which from 1939 onwards was awarded upon application to women who met the standards of 'German blood' and 'genetic health' and who had given birth to at least four children.

The racial policy measures implemented under National Socialism also included:

• the compulsory sterilization, forcible internment, and mass murder of European Roma, Sinti and other peoples pejoratively labeled 'Gypsy' (Romani Holocaust), beginning in 1933;

• the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and between Romani or black people and Germans, among others; it also created the conditions for persons who were not 'citizens of German or related blood' to be deprived of certain citizenship rights;

• the persecution and the genocide of European Jews (Holocaust).

The biologism that prevailed in National Socialist Germany was not only aimed at Germanization, that is, the suppression or elimination of all 'races' that were not the 'Nordic' or 'Aryan race', but also resulted in numerous eugenic measures that were not specifically directed against other 'races', but were aimed at improving the 'Nordic' genetic makeup, for example through forced sterilization or the murder of sick or disabled people.

Current scientific views on race

The belief that race is a biological fact persisted in science even after the end of the Second World War. It was not until the 1970s that previous consensus collapsed. Advances in the field of genetics ultimately provided the insight that there are no significant genetic differences between the groups that had previously been classified as 'races'. The idea that 'racial' gene pools exist was rejected. Issues regarding human differences were increasingly recognized as cultural. The words 'race' and 'racial' began to lose favor and were replaced by the terms 'ethnicity' and 'ethnic'.

In Germany, it was also the horror of the Nazi abuse of 'science' for political ends ('eugenics', Holocaust) that ended the emphasis on biology.

In 2000, the Council of the European Union declared,

The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.

—Council of the EU, Directive 2000/43/EC

In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists declared,

Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination. It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination. Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.

—AABA, Statement on Race and Racism

In Germany, the German Zoological Society in Jena declared, also in 2019:

However, there is no biological basis for races, and there has never been one. The concept of race is the result of racism, not its prerequisite. […] Today and in the future, not using the term race should be part of scientific decency.

—German Zoological Society, Jena Declaration

About this book

The importance of National Socialist racial theory within National Socialist ideology can hardly be overestimated. There is no central text in which this doctrine is authoritatively laid down. Rather, National Socialist racial ideology is based on a multitude of texts that scientific racism has produced. This book provides an overview and shows similarities as well as differences between the individual authors and texts.