The racial ideology that underpinned the Holocaust was not simply prejudice. It was an elaborated theoretical framework, presented with the apparatus of science, which held that human races were biologically distinct entities in competition for survival, that the Aryan race was superior to all others, and that the Jewish race was a particular biological threat to Aryan civilisation that required elimination. The framework was not invented by the Nazis. They inherited it from a century of European racial thought, gave it the imprimatur of state-funded research institutes, and put it to industrial use. The result was a body of supposed scientific knowledge that licensed mass murder by recategorising it as racial hygiene.
Nineteenth-century roots
The idea that humanity was divided into biologically distinct races with different inherent characteristics was a commonplace of European thought throughout the nineteenth century. The Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853 to 1855), argued that the white race was inherently superior to all others and that racial mixing caused the decline of civilisations. Gobineau’s ideas were subsequently picked up and developed in Germany, particularly by the British-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) placed the Aryan race at the apex of human achievement and identified Jews as its primary biological enemy. Chamberlain married Wagner’s daughter Eva in 1908; his book sold widely in Germany and was admired by Hitler, who corresponded with Chamberlain in 1923 and visited him in Bayreuth before his death in 1927.
The decisive nineteenth-century intellectual move was the conflation of Darwinian biology with social policy. The phrase “survival of the fittest” was applied not just to species but to nations, classes, and races. The English social thinker Herbert Spencer and the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, working in different traditions, both argued that human progress required the strong to flourish and the weak to be removed from the breeding population. By the 1890s a programme of “eugenics”, a term coined by Francis Galton in England in 1883, had begun to coalesce: the science of improving the human stock through selective breeding, with negative selection achieved by sterilising or otherwise removing the unfit.
None of this was originally a German monopoly. Eugenic legislation was enacted in the United States from 1907 onwards, with twenty-nine states passing compulsory sterilisation laws by 1937; the United States Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilisation in Buck v. Bell (1927), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing the majority opinion. The Nazis did not invent the eugenic state. They inherited it, adapted it, and pushed it to its logical conclusion.
The German racial science establishment
Under the Weimar Republic and continuing under the Nazi regime, German universities and research institutes invested heavily in what was called Rassenkunde, racial science, and Rassenhygiene, racial hygiene. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in Berlin in 1927 under Eugen Fischer, who had previously conducted skull-measurement studies on the Rehoboth Basters in German South West Africa. The Institute’s work involved the typology of European populations, twin studies, and increasingly after 1933 the racial categorisation of German citizens for the purposes of the Nuremberg Laws.
The work of these institutes had several characteristics. It used the formal apparatus of academic publication: peer review, scholarly journals, university chairs, doctoral supervision. Its researchers held formal qualifications and corresponded with international colleagues. Its conclusions were predetermined by ideology but were dressed in the methods of measurement, statistics, and physical anthropology. The skull calipers, the genealogical tables, the photographic typologies of “Nordic”, “Alpine”, and “Dinaric” types: these were the apparatus of science applied to a thesis whose conclusions had been settled before the measurement began.
After 1933 the institute system became actively involved in the regime’s racial project. Fischer’s institute trained the SS doctors who would later staff the camps. Otmar von Verschuer, Fischer’s successor as director, was the doctoral supervisor of Josef Mengele, who sent samples and human material from Auschwitz to Verschuer’s Berlin laboratory between 1943 and 1944. The work of these institutes was not merely complicit in the Holocaust; it was, in Verschuer’s case, materially supplied by it.
What the racial framework licensed
The Nazi racial framework had specific operational implications that distinguish it from ordinary antisemitic prejudice. The threat the Jews were said to pose was biological. This had three consequences for what could and could not be done about it.
First, it made conversion irrelevant. A Jew who had converted to Christianity, served as a German army officer, written German poetry, or married into a German family was still racially Jewish, because the threat resided in the blood rather than in belief or behaviour. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 codified this: a person was a Jew because of ancestry, not because of practice. Converts and the children of converts were caught in the same net.
Second, it made the murder of children necessary rather than incidental. Jewish children were not exempt from the killing because the racial threat would, on the racial framework, mature in them as it had in their parents. The murder of children was not a regrettable side-effect of military operations. It was an explicit policy requirement, derived from the racial premises.
Third, it created the bureaucratic categories that made industrialised murder administratively possible. The Nuremberg Laws produced a population of registered Jews; the registration produced lists; the lists made deportation possible. Without the racial categorisation that the science provided, the deportation system as it was actually operated would not have functioned.
Why it has to be called pseudo-science
The racial science of the Nazi period is sometimes described as merely “discredited science” or “outdated biology”. This description understates what was wrong with it. The work was not science overtaken by later research. It was pseudo-science from the start, in three specific senses.
The categories themselves did not correspond to biological reality. There is no biological basis for the categorisation of European populations into Nordic, Alpine, Dinaric, and so forth: the genetic variation within any of these groups is greater than the variation between them. Modern population genetics, beginning with the work of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in the 1960s, has demonstrated that the racial categories on which Nazi science was built are not natural kinds. They were artefacts of the measurement system.
The conclusions were predetermined. Nazi racial science did not test hypotheses against evidence; it produced studies that confirmed the categories the ideology required. Where data did not support the predetermined conclusions (for example in Fischer’s own early work in South West Africa, which had shown high vitality in the racially mixed Rehoboth population), the data were reinterpreted to fit.
The conduct of the research violated every norm of scientific ethics. The work supplied by Mengele to Verschuer from Auschwitz, including the body parts and blood samples of murdered prisoners, would have been unpublishable on ethical grounds in any serious scientific tradition. That it was published, and that the researchers retained their positions and reputations after the war (Verschuer became professor of human genetics at Münster in 1951), is a measure of how thoroughly the German academic establishment had been corrupted, and how slowly that corruption was confronted afterwards.
See also
Sources
- Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, Harvard University Press, 1988
- Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933 to 1945, Oxford University Press, 1988
- Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870 to 1945, Cambridge University Press, 1989
- Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich, University of Chicago Press, 2010
- Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Firmin Didot, 1853 to 1855
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, F. Bruckmann, Munich, 1899
- Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
- Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton University Press, 1994
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia entries on Nazi racial science and on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology