Eugen Fischer
Encyclopedia
Eugen Fischer was a German
professor of medicine
, anthropology
and eugenics
. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
between 1927 and 1942. He was appointed rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin by Adolf Hitler
in 1933, and later joined the Nazi Party.
and Nama
prisoners of war. Fetzer received the 17 heads from Dr. P. Bartels, a physician at Shark Island Concentration Camp.. Part of Papua New Guinea
was at that time the German colony Kaiser Wilhelmsland
.
In 1908 Fischer traveled to German South-West Africa
himself to conduct field research. He studied the "Rehoboth bastards", offspring of German
or Boer
fathers and African women in Rehoboth
, present-day Namibia. He argued that while the existing mixed-race (Mischling
) descendants of the mixed marriages might be useful for Germany, he recommended that they should not continue to reproduce. Fischer's recommendations were followed, and by 1912 interracial marriage was prohibited throughout the German colonies.
in 1908 (during the Second Reich). He founded the Society for Race Hygiene in Freiburg in 1908.
Fischer resumed his bastard studies at the end of World War I, with the "Rhineland bastards", and continued through the beginning of the Third Reich. Fischer was prolific, for he was simultaneously working with Charles Davenport
at the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations
.
circa May 20, 1926.
"The KWG
senate founded KWI-A at Ihnestrasse 22/24 in Berlin-Dahlem, with Eugene Fischer director, in 1927 (during the "5th International Congress for Genetic Science", led by Erwin Baur
, meeting in Berlin, in Sept. 1927. Congratulations were also extended to Charles Davenport
at this time. The new institute inherited the skull collection of Rudolf Virchow
and Felix von Luschan
. The custodian of the skull collection was Hans Weinert, also responsible for paleoanthropology and blood group research.
When Fischer was appointed the Director of the Institute, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
was simultaneously appointed as director of Department of Human Genetics. A few years later (1933), Adolf Hitler
appointed Fischer rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin, now Humboldt University.
was considered to be a window on genetics. It was assumed that the environment affected both identical (homozygote) twins in exactly the same way over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, there was no evidence that this was a sound assumption. The evidence was lacking because the assumption is not true. For example, a mutation could affect the development of one of the twins early in their gestation and not affect the other. "These critical theoretical weaknesses in twin research, which were recognizable in principle even considering the state of knowledge at the time, raise the question as to why Fischer and Verschuer oriented the new institute to assymmetrically toward this methodology."
A great deal of emphasis was placed on on Twin studies
, with Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
and his well-known staff (Karin Magnussen
and Josef Mengele
) assuming the leadership in this area of work. During the first years of World War II, Fischer worked with Verschuer to transition the main focus of the work from twin study to Phenogenetics
.
Twin research was useful because "...the focus of biopolitical interest could be proven more or less at will. [...] [Christoph] Mai characterizes twin research as a pseudoscience."
was a mental hospital
in the German town of Hadamar
, which was used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the site of Action T4
(the Nazi euthanasia program for the 'incurably sick').
In its early years, and during the Nazi era, it was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz
and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-called Rhineland Bastard
s was undertaken. Grafeneck Castle
was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of the Action T4.
The KWI-A and Limpieza de Sangre
Even though Fischer didn't officially join the Nazi Party until 1940, he was influential with National Socialists early on. A two-volume work, Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene, co-written by him, Erwin Baur
and Fritz Lenz
, served as the "scientific" basis for Nazism
's attitude toward other races.
He authored The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation
among Humans (1913) , a field study which aimed to determine whether human heredity followed the Mendelian laws by studying the interbreeding of two very different human races, Europeans and Africans, in a small population (3000 individuals) whose family history was well known. Fischer demonstatred that such interbreeding did not result in a new, intermediate race that was reproductively stable, but rather followed the Mendelian laws, according to which each generation would produce throw-backs to the original parent races as well as individuals of intermediate type, in the proportion A + 2AB + B, where A and B represent different alleles of a single gene. Although it is sometimes falsely claimed, for instance in the "Holocaust Encyclopedia" p. 420, that Fischer's study of the Rehoboth Bastards provided context for later racial debates, influenced German colonial legislation and provided "scientific" support for the Nuremberg laws
, it was in fact a work of legitimate physical anthropology, without any element of racialist ideology.
In the years of 1937-1938 Fischer and his colleagues analysed 600 children in Nazi Germany
descending from French-African soldiers who occupied western areas of Germany after First World War; all children were illegally subjected to sterilization
afterwards
" as a "question of race". His answer to this "question of race" turned out to be more differentiated than that of the Nazi party ideologues. Lösch's statement that Fischer was "no anti-semite", but rather a "racist", misses the point.
With Verschuer, Fischer was guest of honor at the opening of the Frankfurt Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question in March 1941. The goal of the "total solution" to the "Jewish question", was bluntly stated there, as the "Volkstod" ("death of the nation").
In 1944 Fischer and the theologian Gerhard Kittel
published a book about "world Jewry of antiquity", a selection of ancient sources with an antiemitic perspective.
"[T]he authorities considered that further investigation of hospitals and universities was
undesirable, ... [because] if understaken on a large scale it might result in necessary removal
from German medicine of large number of highly qualified men at a time when their services
are most needed."
Thus, the ties of the German medical community -- especially those at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes -- were not in any way associated with the death camps; therefore, medical science and the scientists should really be acceptable to the German public and the rest of the world. The SS, and medical personnel such as Mengele who were directly involved with the death camps, were fingered as the most responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.
, until 1942, when he handed over the directorship of the KWI-A to Otmar Frieherr von Verschuer. Fischer returned from Frederick William University of Berlin at the same time. He was made an honorary member of the German Anthropological Society in 1952.
Eugen Fischer returned to his home town of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he continued to work as an anthropologist.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
professor of medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. The Rockefeller Foundation supported both the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics...
between 1927 and 1942. He was appointed rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin by Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
in 1933, and later joined the Nazi Party.
Early research
In 1905, Fischer's study, "Anatomical studies of the soft tissues of the head of two Papuans" was referenced in Christian Fetzer's study of skulls and possibly brains of HereroHerero
The Herero are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group inhabiting parts of Southern Africa. The majority reside in Namibia, with the remainder found in Botswana and Angola. About 240,000 members are alive today.-General:...
and Nama
Nama
Nama may mean:* Nama band, a Greek music group* Nama , a genus of plants in the family Hydrophyllaceae* Holy Name in Indian religions* Nama , a hero in ? folklore who built an ark to save his family from a flood...
prisoners of war. Fetzer received the 17 heads from Dr. P. Bartels, a physician at Shark Island Concentration Camp.. Part of Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...
was at that time the German colony Kaiser Wilhelmsland
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was part of the German New Guinea, the South Pacific protectorate of the German Empire. Named in honor of Wilhelm II, who was the German Emperor and King of Prussia, it included the north-eastern part of the present day Papua New Guinea. From 1884 until 1918, the territory...
.
In 1908 Fischer traveled to German South-West Africa
German South-West Africa
German South West Africa was a colony of Germany from 1884 until 1915, when it was taken over by South Africa and administered as South West Africa, finally becoming Namibia in 1990...
himself to conduct field research. He studied the "Rehoboth bastards", offspring of German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
or Boer
Boer
Boer is the Dutch and Afrikaans word for farmer, which came to denote the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier in Southern Africa during the 18th century, as well as those who left the Cape Colony during the 19th century to settle in the Orange Free State,...
fathers and African women in Rehoboth
Rehoboth, Namibia
Rehoboth is a town of 21,000 inhabitants in central Namibia just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Located on the B1 road, 90 kilometres south of the Namibian capital Windhoek, Rehoboth lies on a high elevation plateau with several natural hot-water springs. It receives sparse mean annual rainfall...
, present-day Namibia. He argued that while the existing mixed-race (Mischling
Mischling
Mischling was the German term used during the Third Reich to denote persons deemed to have only partial Aryan ancestry. The word has essentially the same origin as mestee in English, mestizo in Spanish and métis in French...
) descendants of the mixed marriages might be useful for Germany, he recommended that they should not continue to reproduce. Fischer's recommendations were followed, and by 1912 interracial marriage was prohibited throughout the German colonies.
Bastard studies (1908-1942)
Eugen Fischer studied the "Rehoboth bastards" in German South-West AfricaGerman South-West Africa
German South West Africa was a colony of Germany from 1884 until 1915, when it was taken over by South Africa and administered as South West Africa, finally becoming Namibia in 1990...
in 1908 (during the Second Reich). He founded the Society for Race Hygiene in Freiburg in 1908.
Fischer resumed his bastard studies at the end of World War I, with the "Rhineland bastards", and continued through the beginning of the Third Reich. Fischer was prolific, for he was simultaneously working with Charles Davenport
Charles Davenport
Charles Benedict Davenport was a prominent American eugenicist and biologist. He was one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, which was directly involved in the sterilization of around 60,000 "unfit" Americans and strongly influenced the Holocaust in Europe.- Biography :Davenport was...
at the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations
International Federation of Eugenics Organizations
The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations was founded in 1925. Most members of this organization united eugenics with racism with political propaganda for the enhancement of the 'white race'." Charles Davenport founded the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations and was its...
.
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
Eugen Fischer was recommended for the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) by Erwin BaurErwin Baur
Erwin Baur was a German geneticist and botanist. Baur worked primarily on plant genetics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research . Baur is considered to be the father of plant virology...
circa May 20, 1926.
"The KWG
KWG
KWG is an AM radio station in Stockton, California. KWG is one of the oldest broadcasting stations in USA, signing on November 22, 1921...
senate founded KWI-A at Ihnestrasse 22/24 in Berlin-Dahlem, with Eugene Fischer director, in 1927 (during the "5th International Congress for Genetic Science", led by Erwin Baur
Erwin Baur
Erwin Baur was a German geneticist and botanist. Baur worked primarily on plant genetics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research . Baur is considered to be the father of plant virology...
, meeting in Berlin, in Sept. 1927. Congratulations were also extended to Charles Davenport
Charles Davenport
Charles Benedict Davenport was a prominent American eugenicist and biologist. He was one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, which was directly involved in the sterilization of around 60,000 "unfit" Americans and strongly influenced the Holocaust in Europe.- Biography :Davenport was...
at this time. The new institute inherited the skull collection of Rudolf Virchow
Rudolf Virchow
Rudolph Carl Virchow was a German doctor, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician, known for his advancement of public health...
and Felix von Luschan
Felix von Luschan
Felix Ritter von Luschan was an Austrian doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer.Note that the Ritter is not part of the name but a title, equivalent to the English knight or baronet.-Life:...
. The custodian of the skull collection was Hans Weinert, also responsible for paleoanthropology and blood group research.
When Fischer was appointed the Director of the Institute, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a German human biologist and eugenicist concerned primarily with "racial hygiene" and twin research...
was simultaneously appointed as director of Department of Human Genetics. A few years later (1933), Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
appointed Fischer rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin, now Humboldt University.
"The new institute, as Eugen Fischer had announced proudly, would no longer occupy itself with mere skull measuring. In the sense of opening up anthropology toward human genetics, which Fischer outlined with the catchword of anthropobiology, the conventional, static, taxonomically organized concept of race that proceeded from morphological features was to be abandoned in favor of a dynamic concept of race conceived in terms of evolutionary biology and grounded in genetics. [...] It could be applied to a multitude of topics, practically all anatomical, morphological, physiological, pathological, and psychological features and characteristics -- "from the dimensions of the skull measurements, structure of spine, red hair, the shape of the ear, the pattern of fingerprints, hemogram, or disposition to tuberculosis, all the way to conceptions of morals, criminality, performance in school or talent for playing chess."
Twin study
Twin researchNazi twin study
The methodology of twin study has been used for fraudulent purposes by many scientists. Two famous examples are the "Burt Affair" and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer's work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics....
was considered to be a window on genetics. It was assumed that the environment affected both identical (homozygote) twins in exactly the same way over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, there was no evidence that this was a sound assumption. The evidence was lacking because the assumption is not true. For example, a mutation could affect the development of one of the twins early in their gestation and not affect the other. "These critical theoretical weaknesses in twin research, which were recognizable in principle even considering the state of knowledge at the time, raise the question as to why Fischer and Verschuer oriented the new institute to assymmetrically toward this methodology."
A great deal of emphasis was placed on on Twin studies
Nazi twin study
The methodology of twin study has been used for fraudulent purposes by many scientists. Two famous examples are the "Burt Affair" and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer's work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics....
, with Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a German human biologist and eugenicist concerned primarily with "racial hygiene" and twin research...
and his well-known staff (Karin Magnussen
Karin Magnussen
Karin Magnussen was a researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics during Germany's Third Reich, known for her 1936 publication "Race and Population Policy Tools", and her studies of heterochromia iridis using iris specimens from Auschwitz concentration...
and Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...
) assuming the leadership in this area of work. During the first years of World War II, Fischer worked with Verschuer to transition the main focus of the work from twin study to Phenogenetics
Phenogenetics
Phenogenetics was a new paradigm used to study genetics as pursued at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Phenogenetics would more accurately be described to be more comprehensive than genetics, to be extended into what is now understood to be epigenetics,...
.
"The fact that the question guiding research has been so narrowed certainly had something to do with the philosophies of race hygiene and race anthropology at the time - albeit not so much in the sense of conscious, biopolitical instrumentalization of human genetic research as in the sense of an unconscious incorporation of pre- and extra-scientific interests and mentalities into the conceptualization of research."
Twin research was useful because "...the focus of biopolitical interest could be proven more or less at will. [...] [Christoph] Mai characterizes twin research as a pseudoscience."
Why eugenics?
"If we simply cannot reduce costs any further, if we arrive at conditions similar to those during the war, if these persons can, in fact, no longer be held in compliance with human dignity - whereby no only food, drink, housing, and hygiene, but also medical treatment must be considered -, then arises the serious, absolutely burning question for us, what can happen to curtail the burden of heredity."
"Consequently, in a roundabout way, Fischer opened up the alternative between either minimizing the expenses for closed care to below the existential minimum - and thus triggering mass mortality behind the institutional walls as during World War I - or continuing along the path to opening up the institutions, but then supplementing the open care for the mentally ill, mentally handicapped, and epileptic with eugenic prophylaxis - completely: by means of a sterilization program."
Sterilization
"Consequently, in a roundabout way, Fischer opened up the alternative between either minimizing the expenses for closed care to below the existential minimum - and thus triggering mass mortality behind the institutional walls as during World War I - or continuing along the path to opening up the institutions, but then supplementing the open care for the mentally ill, mentally handicapped, and epileptic with eugenic prophylaxis - completely: by means of a sterilization program."
"Fischer skillfully advanced the argument that there was no longer such a thing as natural reproduction in modern industrial society. Rather, this phenomenon was subject to the constraints of economic relations, so that the hard economic necessity of women's labor compels 'birth control,' but that this takes place 'entirely without plan and without any sense or consideration for the health of the nation and the future.' As such, a 'rationalization of births' was indeed necessary."
Euthanasia
The Hadamar ClinicHadamar Clinic
The Hadamar Euthanasia Centre was a psychiatric hospital in the German town of Hadamar, used by the Nazis as the site of their T-4 Euthanasia Programme, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of "undesirable" members of Nazi society, specifically those with physical and mental...
was a mental hospital
Mental Hospital
Mental hospital may refer to:*Psychiatric hospital*hospital in Nepal named Mental Hospital...
in the German town of Hadamar
Hadamar
Hadamar is a small town in Limburg-Weilburg district in Hesse, Germany.Hadamar is known for its Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry/Centre for Social Psychiatry, lying at the edge of town, in whose outlying buildings is also found the Hadamar Memorial...
, which was used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the site of Action T4
Action T4
Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...
(the Nazi euthanasia program for the 'incurably sick').
In its early years, and during the Nazi era, it was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz
Fritz Lenz
Fritz A Lenz was a German geneticist, member of the Nazi party, and influential specialist in "racial hygiene" during the Third Reich, one of the leading German theorists of "scientific racism" which legitimized the Nazi racial policies, starting with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.- Biography...
and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-called Rhineland Bastard
Rhineland Bastard
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe Afro-German children of mixed German and African parentage who were fathered by Africans serving as French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War I...
s was undertaken. Grafeneck Castle
Grafeneck Castle
The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their euthanasia programme...
was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of the Action T4.
The KWI-A and Limpieza de SangreLimpieza de sangreLimpieza de sangre , Limpeza de sangue or Neteja de sang , meaning "cleanliness of blood", played an important role in modern Iberian history....
"By this time the KWI-A had been integrated into Nazi Jewish policy on the practical level as well. A number of staff members produced 'genetic and race science certificates of descent' (erb- und rassenkundliche Abstammungsgutachten) for the 'Official Expert for Race Research' (Sachverständiger für Rassenforschung), Achim Gercke, and from March 1935 on for the 'Reich Office for Geneaological Research (Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung), renamed in November 1940 to the 'Reich Ancestry Office' (Reichssippenamt) in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In the 1935/36 fiscal year, as mentioned above, Fischer and Abel supplied over 60 of such certificates ...'
Did Eugen Fischer's viewpoint accord with the Nazi ideology?
Günther Brandt (accessory to murder of foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922) said that "the director of the institute [Fischer] is 'spiritually a nationalistic man through and through, ' who would 'soon [...] be entirely pervaded by the National Socialist spirit [...] if he were only influenced properly.'"
"That Fischer yielded to the pressure of his political patron and made active efforts to join the [National Socialist] party from mid-1938 on was probably also a matter of calculation, and closely connected with his plans for reorganizing the institute, which were not to be realized without strong political cover. [...] Reichführer SS Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich HimmlerHeinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
, when asked for an opinion by the staff of the office of the Führer's deputy, offered support for Fischer and Lenz in 1938 ... " Ultimately, with additional backing from BormannBormannBormann is a Germanic surname most common in Germany and the Netherlands. People having this surname include:* Ernest Bormann , American academic* Ernst Bormann , German World War I flying ace and World War II Luftwaffe general...
, Fischer officially became a Nazi on 12/12/1939.
Even though Fischer didn't officially join the Nazi Party until 1940, he was influential with National Socialists early on. A two-volume work, Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene, co-written by him, Erwin Baur
Erwin Baur
Erwin Baur was a German geneticist and botanist. Baur worked primarily on plant genetics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research . Baur is considered to be the father of plant virology...
and Fritz Lenz
Fritz Lenz
Fritz A Lenz was a German geneticist, member of the Nazi party, and influential specialist in "racial hygiene" during the Third Reich, one of the leading German theorists of "scientific racism" which legitimized the Nazi racial policies, starting with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.- Biography...
, served as the "scientific" basis for Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
's attitude toward other races.
He authored The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
among Humans (1913) , a field study which aimed to determine whether human heredity followed the Mendelian laws by studying the interbreeding of two very different human races, Europeans and Africans, in a small population (3000 individuals) whose family history was well known. Fischer demonstatred that such interbreeding did not result in a new, intermediate race that was reproductively stable, but rather followed the Mendelian laws, according to which each generation would produce throw-backs to the original parent races as well as individuals of intermediate type, in the proportion A + 2AB + B, where A and B represent different alleles of a single gene. Although it is sometimes falsely claimed, for instance in the "Holocaust Encyclopedia" p. 420, that Fischer's study of the Rehoboth Bastards provided context for later racial debates, influenced German colonial legislation and provided "scientific" support for the Nuremberg laws
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
, it was in fact a work of legitimate physical anthropology, without any element of racialist ideology.
In the years of 1937-1938 Fischer and his colleagues analysed 600 children in Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
descending from French-African soldiers who occupied western areas of Germany after First World War; all children were illegally subjected to sterilization
Compulsory sterilization
Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...
afterwards
Attitude to Jews and Gypsies
Antisemitic asides in his private correspondence provide evidence of his antisemitism. He was a racial antisemite, regarding the "Jewish questionJewish Question
The Jewish question encompasses the issues and resolutions surrounding the historically unequal civil, legal and national statuses between minority Ashkenazi Jews and non-Jews, particularly in Europe. The first issues discussed and debated by societies, politicians and writers in western and...
" as a "question of race". His answer to this "question of race" turned out to be more differentiated than that of the Nazi party ideologues. Lösch's statement that Fischer was "no anti-semite", but rather a "racist", misses the point.
The Jewish question was in practice the most pressing race question for the German nation, because the Jews were the only people of a strange race who lived within our volk in large numbers. The awareness of a separation in terms of blood, however, did not by any means exclude personal association with individual Jews. [...] Even within the race hygeine movement I had sustained friendly relations in Berlin to the Jewish ophthalmologist Dr. Czeillitzer and undertook a joint scientific project with the Jewish serologist Schiff. This did not deter me from seeing the dangers that threatened the German volk as a whole from Jewry. I received themost flagrant impressions of this from my years in Berlin from 1927-1933., where one encountered Jewry at every turn in the economy and in cultural insttutions and could always feel its close link with the rampant corruption prevalent at the time. The volkish and racial separation between Germans and Jews thus seemed to me a necessary demand to resolve the emerging difficulties for both sides. Through my scientific work I was at pains to work out the foundations to resolve this issue.
With Verschuer, Fischer was guest of honor at the opening of the Frankfurt Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question in March 1941. The goal of the "total solution" to the "Jewish question", was bluntly stated there, as the "Volkstod" ("death of the nation").
In 1944 Fischer and the theologian Gerhard Kittel
Gerhard Kittel
Gerhard Kittel was a German Protestant theologian, lexicographer of biblical languages, and open anti-Semite...
published a book about "world Jewry of antiquity", a selection of ancient sources with an antiemitic perspective.
Postwar investigation
"Publicizing German medical atrocities could undermine wholesale public confidence in clinical science." To avoid the appearance that the entire medical community could no longer be trusted, the Nuremberg Medical Trial political appointees "... presented medical researchers as having been 'perverted' by the manipulative control of the SS and as poisoned by Nazism..." and instead that "the human experiments were so ill-conceived as not to be worthy of the status of science...""[T]he authorities considered that further investigation of hospitals and universities was
undesirable, ... [because] if understaken on a large scale it might result in necessary removal
from German medicine of large number of highly qualified men at a time when their services
are most needed."
"On 19 September 1949 Heubner, and the KWG scientists Adolf Butenandt, Max Hartmann, and Boris Rajewsky cleared Verschuer. This Dahlem commission marked the reverse of the NMTDoctors' TrialThe Doctors' Trial was the first of 12 trials for war crimes that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II. These trials were held before U.S...
, as it was a tribunal of peers (mostly tarnished by various degrees of complicity under National Socialism). The commission could easily reject that Verschuer was a racial fanatic, or that he collaborated with the SS -- for science under National Socialism did not necessarily work this way. It played down the significance of theThis Dahlem commission marked the reverse of the NMTDoctors' TrialThe Doctors' Trial was the first of 12 trials for war crimes that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II. These trials were held before U.S...
, Mengele link by stressing that he was only a camp doctor, who would have followed SS regulations against spreading information about Auschwitz as an extermination camp."
Thus, the ties of the German medical community -- especially those at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes -- were not in any way associated with the death camps; therefore, medical science and the scientists should really be acceptable to the German public and the rest of the world. The SS, and medical personnel such as Mengele who were directly involved with the death camps, were fingered as the most responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.
Later life
Eugen Fischer served as the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and EugenicsKaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. The Rockefeller Foundation supported both the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics...
, until 1942, when he handed over the directorship of the KWI-A to Otmar Frieherr von Verschuer. Fischer returned from Frederick William University of Berlin at the same time. He was made an honorary member of the German Anthropological Society in 1952.
Eugen Fischer returned to his home town of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he continued to work as an anthropologist.
Works
- Maass, Alfred. Durch Zentral-Sumatra. Berlin: Behr. 1910. Additional contributing authors: J.P. Kleiweg de Zwaan and E. Fischer.
- Gaupp, Ernst Wilhelm Theodor. Eugen Fischer (ed.) August Weismann: sein Leben und sein Werk. Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer. 1917.
- Schwalbe, G. and Eugen Fischer (eds.). Anthropologie. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1923.
- Fischer, E. and H.F.K. Günther. Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse: 50 Abbildungen mit Geleitwarten. Munich: J.F. Lehmann. 1927.
- Fischer, Eugen and Gerhard Kittel. Das antike Weltjudentum : Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943.
- Sarkar, Sasanka Sekher; Eugen Fischer and Keith Arthur, The Aboriginal Races of India, Calcutta: Bookland. 1954.
- Fischer, Eugen. Begegnungen mit Toten: aus den Erinnerungen eines Anatomen. Freiburg: H.F. Schulz. 1959.
External links
- Book Review of The Rehoboth Bastards in Nature (1913)
- 2004 Newspaper Article regarding The Rehoboth Bastards
- The Rehoboth Bastards (Photo Album)
- http://www.ezakwantu.com/Gallery%20Herero%20and%20Namaqua%20Genocide.htm#Medical%20experimentation%20in%20Africa
See also
- Ex-Nazi
- Nazi eugenicsNazi eugenicsNazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns...
- Racial policies of the Third Reich
- Research Materials: Max Planck Society ArchiveResearch Materials: Max Planck Society ArchiveAt the end of World War II, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Society, and the institutes associated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society were renamed "Max Planck" institutes. The records that were archived under the former Kaiser Wilhelm Society and its institutes were placed in the...
- Scientific racismScientific racismScientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
- Subsequent Nuremberg TrialsSubsequent Nuremberg TrialsThe Subsequent Nuremberg Trials were a series of twelve U.S...
- Doctors' TrialDoctors' TrialThe Doctors' Trial was the first of 12 trials for war crimes that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II. These trials were held before U.S...
- AnthropometryAnthropometryAnthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual...