History of Antisemitism Clasiif of Taboos

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History of Antisemitism

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Taboo and Classification: Post-1945 German

RacialWriting onJews*

BY AMOS MORRIS-REICH

In the library catalogue in The Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology,

Human Genetics, and Eugenics, founded in 1927, we ¢nd six categories of humans.

Five of the six categories are geographical, while Judentum (meaning both Jewry

and Judaism) constitutes the sixth.1

Such categorization re£ects the belief of manyGerman scientists and scholars (non-Jewish as well as Jewish) in the ¢rst half of the

twentieth century that Jews were a racially de¢ned population and Judaism

fundamentally a racial phenomenon. The question with which this paper is

concerned is: did German scientists and scholars continue to hold this belief after

the SecondWorld War?

* I was greatly helped by Mitchell Ash, Steven Aschheim, Margit Berner, Lorraine Daston, EricEhrenreich, Uwe Hossfeld, Veronika Lipphardt, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Gabi Motzkin, Martin Ritter,Dirk Rupnow, Hans-Walter Schmul, Eugene Sheppard, Andrew Shryock, Alexander von Schwerin,and Danny Trom. I am particularly indebted to Sander Gilman and Ezra Mendelsohn for criticalremarks on an earlier version of this article. I wish to thank Irene Tschurin for her diligent assistancein locating and reviewing relevant materials.

1Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Grenzu«berschreitungen: Das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fu«r Anthropologie, menschlicheErblehre und Eugenik 1927-1945 , Go « ttingen 2005, pp. 301-302. I was ¢rst drawn to expressions of tension between older forms of knowledge and new constraints when, searching for publicationsfrom the National-Socialist period unavailable in Israeli libraries, I discovered that manyunquestionably racist texts were reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s. Re-publication followed a certainset of unstated criteria that were themselves the result of a dynamic form of negotiation. Works thatexplicitly supported Hitler, National Socialist doctrine and policy, and antisemitism were notreprinted. In many cases the relevant statements, particularly in the preface, were removed withoutan indication of the omission. For discussion see Gerhard Kaiser, Mathias Krell, ‘Ausblenden,

Versachlichen, U « berschreiben. Diskursives Vergangenheitsmanagement in der Sprach-undLiteraturwissenschaft in Deutschland nach 1945’, in Bernd Weisbrod (ed.), AkademischeVergangenheitspolitik: Beitra « ge zur Wissenschaftskultur der Nachkriegszeit , Go « ttingen 2002, pp. 190-214.Examples of writers discussed in this article include: Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Als Beduine unter Beduinen, Freiburg: 1954 originally published with the same title in Freiburg 1933; idem., Umgang mit Arabern des Ostens, Nuremberg 1949, which is identical with Araber , Nuremberg 1943. Both appearedin the series Umgang mit Vo «lkern. Hans F.K. Gu « nther, Platon, als, Hu «ter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung fu «r die Gegenwart , Ba «benberg, 1966 which ¢rst appeared in 1928and was republished in 1935; idem., Formen und Urgeschichte der Ehe: Die Formen der Ehe, Familie und Verwandtschaft , Go « ttingen 1951, originally published 1940.. Egon von Eickstedt, Die Forschung amMenschen, 3 vols. Vol. II, Stuttgart 1940. [1962]. Other examples include Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch:seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt , Berlin 1940, republished (with important omissions) in

numerous editions after 1945. Cf. Der Mensch: seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt , Bonn 1950.Another example is Erich Rothacker, Probleme der Kulturanthropologie, Stuttgart 1942. Republishedwith modi¢cations as Probleme der Kulturanthropologie, Bonn 1948. Eugen Fischer’s Rehobother Bastarden(1912) was republished up to 1961.All translations from foreign sources are the author’s own.

Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 58, 195^215 doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybt015Advance Access publication 2 July 2013

The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute.

All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]



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This is a question more easily asked than answered because, on several registers, it

runs up against complex historical and methodological di⁄culties that concern the

changing relationship between science, Rasse (race), and antisemitism after 1945.

Historians acknowledge that, while the idea of Stunde Null does not re£ecthistorical reality in any simple sense, it is an important West German cultural

construct nonetheless.2 The structural tension that stands at the basis of the

following is the fact that there was no Stunde Null in the sciences of race, but there

was something that came close to it with regard to references to Jews therein.3

Whereas the role of Rasse for understanding German history in the ¢rst half of the

twentieth century is widely acknowledged, it is only now emerging as a category of

analysis for the study of the second half,4 and to unpack the relationship between

the science of race and references to Jews in this latter period necessitates

recognizing the changing status of race in public discourse and within science, thechanging relationship between racial sciences and the political sphere, and the

rede¢nition of the relationship between sciences of race and antisemitism. But

attempting to bring together these di¡erent variables involves introducing ^ at

least to some extent ^ contradictory and even objectionable assumptions.

One necessary starting point for any attempt to answer the questionposited above

must be recognition of the fact that the crimes of National Socialist Germany were

motivated and justi¢ed by means of antisemitic ideas of Rasse. One consequence of

this was that aspects of the history of science were identi¢ed after the war as in fact

belonging to wider structures of the history of politics, violence, and genocide. Butthere is now also a growing body of literature that shows that the history of various

branches of race, such as genetics and physical anthropology, from the turn of the

twentieth century and in both the Weimar and National Socialist periods, was in

fact integral to that of science.5 Thus, to analyze post-1945 developments means to

extend this perspective further into the history of science.

Such an extension, however, must engage with particularities speci¢c to West

German culture, without attention to which the analysis of individual cases

remains opaque. Most probably because after 1945 the sciences of race became

associated with the National Socialist regime and its racial policies, individual

scientists were motivated to attempt to generate distance from that past.6 Maybe

2Uta Gerhardt, Soziologie der Stunde Null. Zur Gesellschaftskonzeption des amerikanischen Besatzungsregimes inDeutschland 1944^1945/6 , Frankfurt am Main 2005.

3Writing on the biology of the Jews outside Germany £ourished in English (and Hebrew) in the 1950s.For a historical overview see Nurit Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics in Israel in the 1950s: TheUnconscious Internalization of Ideology,’ in Isis 94 (2003), pp. 631-655.

4See in particular Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geo¡ Eley, Atina Grossmann (eds.), After the NaziRacial State: Di¡erence and Democracy in Germany and Europe, Ann Arbor 2009.

5I am closer to the interpretation developed byAndrew Zimmermann, Anthropology and Antihumanism inImperial Germany, Chicago 2001. For a recent expression of the view of a paradigmatic shift and the

rise of racial determinism see Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago 2010; Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in theThird Reich, Chicago 2010.

6Uwe Hofeld, Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland: Von den Anfa «ngen bis in dieNachkriegszeit , Stuttgart 2005, pp. 367-368. Discussion of the history of the discipline in the National

196 Amos Morris-Reich



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the most important characteristic of West German history of science, at least in our

context, concerns the emergence of an opposition between legitimate sciences of

race (genetics, physical anthropology) and pseudoscienti¢c ideologies of race ^

Rassenkunde.7

While necessary for an understanding of developments after the war, this

opposition does not re£ect the status of the respective ¢elds of knowledge before

1945. Furthermore, while related to them it nevertheless also di¡ers from our

contemporary views; for if human genetics is viewed today as a valid science,

physical anthropology, which according to the binary speci¢c to West Germany

now fell on the side of science, has today lost much of its former credibility.

Furthermore, from early in the second half of the twentieth century onwards, most

historians and historians of science viewed ‘races’ not as simple biological entities

but as constructs that always involved non-biological considerations. The writersaddressed in this article, however, were committed to the scienti¢c validity of the

idea of race and viewed the 1950 United Nations declaration denying the scienti¢c

status of race as politically motivated.

Whereas in the academic discourse there was a great deal of conceptual, personal,

and institutional continuity with the period before 1945,8 after the war the term

Rasse virtually disappeared from the public German lexicon.9 The social and

political signi¢cance of the sciences that dealt with race changed dramatically

after 1945 also because science and politics no longer served as mutual resources

for each other with regard to race.

10

In the recon¢gured interface between society, science, and race, statements about

Jews were rede¢ned as political and as potentially or latently antisemitic.

The immediate consequence of this situation was the destabilization of discussion of

Jews, up to then an integral component of the scienti¢c discourse of race, by authors

who wished to be taken as partaking in legitimate science or serious scholarship.

The structural nucleus of this article concerns the consequence of this discrepancy

between, on the one hand, the ‘classi¢cation’ that constitutes the general discourse,

and, on the other, the‘taboo’that constrains discussion of a particular object.

Once this structure is grasped numerous varieties of tension begin to surface in

di¡erent cases, ranging from the almost complete disappearance of references to

Jews, through their re-encoding by way of linguistic or photographic materials,

Socialist period was generally avoided. See Benoit Massin, ‘Anthropologie und Humangenetik im

Nationalsozialismus oder: Wie schreiben deutsche Wissenschaftler ihre eigene

Wissenschaftsgeschichte?’, in Heidrun Kaupen-Haas, Christian Saller (eds.), Wissenschaftlicher

Rassismus. Analysen einer Kontinuita «t in den Human-und Naturwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p.17.7See Dirk Rupnow, Veronika Lipphardt, Jens Thiel, Christina Wessely (eds.), Pseudowissenschaft:

Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008.8Hofeld, pp. 422-424.9

See Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, ‘Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Postwar GermanHistory in Context,’ in After the Nazi Racial State, p. 3.10Mitchell G. Ash, ‘Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen fu « r einander’, in Ru « diger vom Bruch,

Brigitte Kaderas (eds.), Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik. Bestandsaufnahme zu Formationen, Bru «chenund Kontinuita«ten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 32-51.

Taboo and Classification 197



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to their practical reclassi¢cation by way of medical or geographical contraction.

This article, then, detects and documents ‘small tensions’ in local, concrete, and

practical decisions that scientists and writers on race were compelled to make with

regard to the use of sources, signi¢ers, tropes, or ideas.11

Discussion of Jewish racial di¡erence did not come to a complete halt after

1945. But its destabilization led to a complex, ambivalent, and multilayered

intellectual structure, fraught with tensions and gaps of various kinds.12 The

di¡erent manifestations of tension, therefore, can rightly be considered part of one

intellectual structure.

The tensions and inversions built into this structure, however, entail that the

attempt to contextualize individual cases is fraught with di⁄culties. How, for

example, are we to understand the sharper break with regard to Jewish racial

di¡erence in Rassenkunde, a ¢eld hitherto more deeply and directly antisemitic,than in physical anthropology; or the repeated claims for higher Jewish IQ average

than the respective Wirtsvolk (host-population, a word to which I return below)

made by a younger geneticist who did not view himself as antisemitic? To make

sense of these cases necessitates situating them within the particulars of West

German culture. It means on some occasions positing certain contextualizing

assumptions such as the opposition between legitimate science and antisemitic

ideology; while from our current perspective this opposition is problematic

because a self-servicing device by which scientists were able to legitimate their own

racist work, nevertheless without positing it the cases remain impenetrable.In the sections that follow I examine the three German scienti¢c discourses

arguably most closely associated with the idea of ‘race’ in the German context:

human genetics, Rassenkunde (racial ethnology), and Anthropologie (physical

anthropology).13Rasse was interwoven into numerous ¢elds but these three were

practically founded on Rasse and undergirded by racial classi¢cation. The

temporal framework of this article is con¢ned to the period between 1945 and the

early 1990s. In this period three di¡erent trajectories of three di¡erent ¢elds of

knowledge can be identi¢ed. After the early 1990s the intellectual structure of

‘taboo and classi¢cation’ breaks up or dissolves.

11The analytical framework of Mary Douglas can stabilize the object of our discussion. Douglasestablished taboo as always dependent on classi¢catory schemes and the de¢nition of an object or athing, for instance to be classi¢ed as belonging to a certain class or diverging from it is always a‘‘by-product of a systematic ordering and classi¢cation of matter.’’ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo, London 2002, p. 44. For an attempt to study thisculture in terms of latency see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Nach 1945: Latenz als Ursprung der Gegenwart ,Frankfurt 2012.

12I do not know of literature on taboo within science. On classi¢cation cf. Emma C. Spary, Utopia’sGarden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution, Chicago 2000; Brian W. Ogilvie, The

Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe, Chicago 2006, in particular pp. 215-229. Onclassi¢cation from a science studies perspective, see Geo¡rey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, SortingThings Out: Classi¢cation and Its Consequences, Cambridge 1999, pp. 195-225.

13For parallels with the ¢eld of history see Gadi Algazi’s work on Otto Brunner: Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im spa«ten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch, Frankfurt^New York 1996.




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HUMAN GENETICS: FROM OMISSION TO A CRITICAL HISTORY

Against the foil of the complete removal of Jews from discussion among the ¢rst

generation of geneticists whose career continued into the postwar era ^ asexempli¢ed by Otmar von Verschuer14 ^ my account focuses on a prominent

member of the younger generation, FriedrichVogel (1925-2006), and his attempt to

remove antisemitic signi¢ers from human genetics as part of its scienti¢c

rehabilitation.15

Born in Berlin in1925,Vogel grew up during the National Socialist periodand was

drafted into the German army immediately upon graduation from school. After

his release from an Allied prison in 1946 he took up the study of medicine. Several

of his obituarists noted that the choice of genetics for his doctoral dissertation and

¢eld of research was considered a brave move, given the discipline’s taintedreputation from the National Socialist period. He completed his dissertation at

the Max Planck Institute for comparative hereditary Biology and hereditary

Pathology in Berlin-Dahlem under the supervision of Hans Nachtsheim.

Nachtsheim was considered at the time as arguably the only prominent human

geneticist untainted by collaboration with the National Socialist regime. In 1957

Vogel passed his habilitation and, in 1962, was appointed director of the newly

founded Institute of Human Genetics and Anthropology in Heidelberg.

Two sets of, to some extent, contradictory facts serve as the matrices of the

following discussion.16 The ¢rst is that, despite the di¡erence between human

genetics and physical anthropology institutionally, methodologically, or

semantically deep into the 1960s (with the introduction of molecular genetics), it is

practically impossible to completely separate the study of Erblehre (heredity),

human genetics, and physical anthropology. Institutionally, methodologically, and

14On his scienti¢cally antisemitic writings prior to and during the National Socialist period and hiswork with Mengele, see Eric Ehrenreich,‘Otmar von Verschuer and the ‘scienti¢c’ Legitimization of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy’, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21 (1) 2007, pp. 57-58. Von Verschuermentions Jews brie£y in his Genetik des Menschen: Lehrbuch der Humangenetik, Munich^ Berlin 1959, p.237, as well his comments on the frailty of Jews to tuberculosis, based on research he conducted

during the National Socialist period, p. 263. And in a similar vein ‘Erblehre vom Menschen‘, in idemet al., Der Mensch und seine Stellung im Naturganzen, Konstanz 1965, p. 101. In the bibliography made inhis honour his publications on Jews were removed, see Ehrenreich, p. 67.

15Yael Hashiloni-Dolev has provided us with a comprehensive sociological analysis of the study of reproductive genetics in Israel and Germany. While she notes the ‘‘gigantic repression’’ of the historyof genetics in Germany from 1945 up to the 1970s, her analysis focuses primarily on German societyfrom the 1990s, which she characterizes as one deeply aware of its murderous past. What we lack,therefore, is a description of the process of change. Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, A Life (Un)Worthy of Living: Reproductive Genetics in Israel and Germany, Dordrecht 2007, p. 27. Anne Cotterbrune, ‘DieWestdeutsche Humangenetik auf dem Weg zu ihrer universita « ren Institutionalisierung nach 1945 ^ Zwischen Neuausrichtung und Kontinuita «t’, in Das Heidelberger Institut fu «r Humangenetik: Vorgeschichteund Ausbau Festschrift zum 50-ja «hrigenJubila «um in (1961-2012), Heidelberg 2012, p. 32.

16

For recent studies on Vogel see in particular the ¢rst articles in Cotterbrune and Eckart. On Vogel’searly work for Nachtsheim, together with a German Jewish remigrant from Palestine, WaltherHirsch, see Alexander von Schwerin, ‘A ‘stranger’ in Germany: the pediatrician Walter Hirsch andpopulation genetics in West Berlin’, unpublished manuscript presented at the conferenceThe Study of Jewish Biological Di¡erence After 1945 , in Berlin, October 2012.




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personally, in sources and resources, avenues of publication, and scienti¢c networks

they were thoroughly intertwined. The second set pertains to Vogel’s background

as a student of Nachtsheim, who up until 1945 worked closely with von Verschuer

but after 1945 turned against him. Already in the early 1950s Vogel viewed his workas opposed to the murderous biopolitics of National Socialism (in the 1990s Vogel

stated his belief in what he termed genetischer Humanismus (genetic humanism),17 but

he was educated in an academic environment deeply steeped in ideas of racial

heredity and his early work on genetic mutations was shaped by methods

developed in the context of racial studies, focusing on normal variability and

genetic pathologies, now recast to address the fear of atomic radiation.18

InVogel’s writing over time it is possible to discern the gradual development of a

strategy intended to address directly and critically the tension between taboo and

classi¢cation. In 1961 he published a Handbook of General Human Genetics,

19

inwhichJews appear in statistical tables based on older tables. But he does not merely

reproduce the older tables; he also notes that no communities have remained

genetically isolated ^ several racial scholars viewed the Jews as the classic case of

the isolated community ^ due to Verjagung (persecution) and Wirren (political

turmoil),20 in other words, due to conditions imposed on them from the outside.

Vogel brie£y discussesJews in the context of Ashkenazi genetic diseases.21

An entire section of Vogel’s 1961 work is devoted to the question of the Rassenseele

(racial-soul), a term that carries speci¢c National Socialist connotations. He

begins his discussion by admitting that the topic is still emotionally sensitive,

especially since the tradition of Gobineau and Chamberlain ascribed preeminence

to the Germanic race, a claim that contributed to the methodical liquidation of

‘‘enemies of the Nordic master-race’’. Vogel rejects the vulgar prejudices of Hans

F.K. Gu « nther but, in a footnote, praises Bruno Petermann’s 1938 monograph on the

subject of Rassenseele.22 Vogel therefore applies the West German demarcation line,

but at this stage, the concepts and language at his disposal are still ripe with

National Socialist antisemitic connotation.

Vogel elaborates on the di¡erences in IQ between black and white people, noting

the Jews’ higher IQ average than that of their Wirtsvo «lker (host-populations) ^

before the National Socialist period the term Wirtsvolk was employed by both non-

Jewish and Jewish authors; its antisemitic connotations, born from its close

association with the supposed parasitic nature of the Jew, were only established

17Cornelius Borck, ‘Verhaltungsgenetik und Elektroenzephalographie: Friedrich VogelsGrundlagensforschung fu « r einen genetischen Humanismus’, in Anne Cotterbrune, Wolfgang Eckart(eds.), Das Heidelberger Institut fu«r Humangenetik, pp. 130, 140.

18See Alexander von Schwerin, ‘Humangenetik im Atomzeitalter: von der Mutationsforschung zumgenetischen Bevo « lkerungsregister‘, Heidelberger Institut fu «r Humangenetik, 87. Cotterbrune, Das

Heidelberger Institut fu«r Humangenetik.19FriedrichVogel, Lehrbuch der Allgemeinen Humangenetik, Berlin 1961.20Ibid., p. 565.21Ibid., p. 567.22Ibid., p. 663.




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later.23 It seems clear that Vogel believes he is taking a critical stance towards

antisemitism. But his use of the word Wirtsvolk carries with it antisemitic

connotations. Was he unaware of these? Is it, perhaps, that the scienti¢c language

at his disposal is still saturated in antisemitic overtones? Or is his stance, after all,more ambivalent than the later historian wants to believe in that Vogel meant to

imply that it is good that Jews are no longer ‘‘hosted’’ on what is for them foreign

European soil? Vogel also cites Fritz Lenz, a National Socialist geneticist, as an

authority.24 In the same vein, he denies that racial mixture has negative genetic

e¡ects on the o¡spring of a‘‘creative race’’,25 but on sociological grounds he accepts

the view that racially mixed marriages are destined to misery and anguish.

In his 1981 book, co-authored with his student Peter Propping (born 1942), Jewish

IQ is treated in greater detail.26 The context is again supposed genetically based

racial di¡erences in IQ,27 especially with regard to the percentage of Nobel Prize

laureates.While Jews were dispersed throughout the world the book argues, based

on the classi¢cation of Jews as a racially or biologically de¢ned group, they

remained genetically isolated because of religious decrees, and therefore IQ

di¡erences can be viewed as genetically embedded.28 Vogel mentions certain

factors, such as the Jews’ urban character, the laws prohibiting them from owning

land or working manually, their concentration in commerce which reinforces their

business acumen and adaptability, as well as their respect for and appreciation of

learning and knowledge. Generation after generation they su¡ered murderous

persecution at the hands of the Christians, he writes, and the more intelligent

among them survived, according to Vogel, because they were protected by theircommunities.29 While their value is here inverted, Vogel’s discussion is still

dependent on a set of antisemitic beliefs and motifs.

In1986 Vogel and Karl Sperling organized the International Congress of Human

Genetics in Berlin, the ¢rst international meeting of human geneticists in postwar

Germany. This event, particularly Vogel’s moving welcome address, was

considered the beginning of the discipline’s coming to terms with its past. But an

even sharper illustration of the transformation in German human genetics

from Fischer and von Verschuer to Vogel appears in the latter’s book Human

23Alex Bein,‘The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with special referenceto Germany’, in LBI Year Book, vol. 9 (1964), pp. 3-40.

24Vogel, pp. 666-667.25Ibid., p. 667-668.26Friedrich Vogel, Peter Propping, Ist unser Schicksal mitgeboren?Moderne Vererbungsforschung und menschliche

Psyche [Is our Destiny Born with Us? Modern Study of Heredity and Human Psychology ], Berlin 1981. Thebook appeared with a publisher whose owners, the non-Jewish Siedler and the Jewish Severin, werepersecuted by the National Socialists. For a comprehensive account of ‘Jewish intelligence’, seeSander L. Gilman, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence, Lincoln 1996.Brock interprets the term mitgeboren in the title as a semantic shift away from angeboren and as anexpression of an attempt to move away from a determinist interpretation of genes to a humanistic

one. Brock, p. 141.27Vogel, Propping, p. 115. Vogel cites his Jewish colleague Walter Hirsch as evidence. See von Schwering,‘A ‘Stranger’ in Germany’, p. 11.

28Ibid., p.118.29Ibid.,p. 119.




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GeneticsçProblems and Approaches, published in English jointly with Arno Motulsky.30

Motulsky, a renowned Jewish professor at the University of Washington’s School of

Medicine, was born in Germany and survived the Holocaust.

The textbook opens with a history of human genetics in a number of countries.The section on Germany stresses the intimate connection between the discipline

and antisemitism. It portrays the founding fathers of human genetics in Germany,

those scientists and scholars who assented to National Socialist leadership and

philosophy, such as Fischer, Ru « din and vonVerschuer, as well as Fritz Lenz who, it

will be remembered,Vogel still quoted as an expert onJews.31The section discusses

vonVerschuer’s contribution to Mengele’s medical experiments in Auschwitz at the

height of the ‘Final Solution’. Vogel and Motulsky state that this was one of

‘‘the most macabre and tragic chapters in the history of man’s inhumanity to man

in the name of pseudoscienti¢c nationalism’’

32

(This passage was reprinted in the2010 edition of the book).33

In the third edition considerable space was devoted to the Jews. Some of the

discussion of race here relates to visual materials that were published in Germany

in 1937,34 and also to cases of dizygotic twins where the biological father of each

twin is di¡erent that human geneticists had reviewed for German courts following

the Nuremberg Racial Laws.35 But most of the discussion focuses on genetic

diseases among Ashkenazi Jews,36 the relationship between genetic selection and

drift,37 and the Jews’ superlative IQ average.38 Accepting the post-1945 West

German opposition between science and pseudo-science, and attempting to a⁄rm

the position of human genetics on the side of genuine science,Vogel’s writing career

therefore exempli¢es transformations in scienti¢c belief systems as well as the

tortuous gradual eradication of antisemitic signi¢ers. This by way of the implicit

rede¢nition of racial di¡erence as genetic di¡erence, and by limiting its expression

to speci¢c genetic diseases and IQ averages.

FROM RACE TO RELIGIOSITY: DISPLACEMENT AND

RE-CODIFICATION OF SIGNIFIERS IN HANS F.K.

GU « NTHER’S RASSENKUNDE

Rassenkunde was the site of an intersection of anthropological and humanist

methods, including those of history, philology and the study of religion with

30FriedrichVogel, Arno G. Motulsky (eds.), Human GeneticsçProblems and Approaches, Heidelberg 1997.31Ibid., p. 18.32Ibid., p. 19.33Michael. R. Speicher, Stylianos E. Antonarakis, Arno. G. Motulsky (eds.), Human GeneticsçProblems

and Approaches, Heidelberg 2010.34

Ibid., p. 230.35Ibid. p. 229.36Ibid., pp. 290, 432, 505.37Ibid., pp. 577-578.38Ibid., pp. 706-707.




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biological notions of race.39 With the introduction of the West German opposition

between racial science and racial ideology, Rassenkunde became the epitome of the

latter and Hans F.K. Gu « nther, the most prominent racial writer of the 1920s and

the 1930s, and unquestionably the most in£uential writer addressed in this article,became the personi¢cation of the racial ideologue.

In his mammoth study on the racial characteristics of the Jews, Rassenkunde des

ju «dischen Volkes (1930), Gu « nther developed the idea that the Jews were a mongrel-

people, an anti-race that had developed following a long process of Gegenauslese

(counter-selection), with potentially devastating consequences for the natural

order of humanity.40 But in terms of the history of scienti¢c classi¢cation Gu « nter’s

in£uential de¢nitions persisted, for they were the basis of physical anthropology.

Gu « nther’s postwar writings show how, in an attempt to regain scholarly legitimacy,

he shifted his focus from race to religiosity and, in a partially transformed

intellectual context, came to displace his former antisemitic tropes and signi¢ers.

Gu « nther was not tried in Nuremberg, but nevertheless as Himmler’s teacher and

as a close associate of Rosenberg, belonged to a small group of writers that was

de¢nitely linked to National Socialism. He spent three years in an internment

camp, but was released after it was decided that, although he had been a member

of the National Socialist establishment, as a mere Mitla «ufer (bystander) he had not

initiated or perpetrated its criminal acts.

While his ideas remained basically the same, signi¢cant transformations did

occur in Gu « nther’s choice of topics, style of writing, and use of visual images. His

writing between 1922 and 1945 had been based on a ¢xed de¢nition of race, and

while race permeates his postwar work, it does so di¡erently. He no longer

trumpets his de¢nition of race. But when he analyzes the religious attitudes of

Indo-Europeans ^ the subject of a 1963 work ^ his racial de¢nitions are still visible

between the lines. Some of the older key terms, such as ‘race’ and ‘Nordic’ are

present, but their frequency and visibility is reduced. Race, in e¡ect, recedes to the

subtext.

Identi¢ed now as the personi¢cation of the racial ideologue, his attempt to

republish his book, Platon als Hu «ter des Lebens encountered opposition.41 Gu « nther

decided to temporarily publish under a pseudonym and shifted the perspective of his studies from race to religiosity. In 1952, and under the name of Heinrich

Ackermann, he published a two-volume study entitled Jesus: seine Botschaft und deren

Aufnahme im Abendland ,42 and in 1963, under his real name, the study on

39Proctor, pp. 138-179.40Hans F. K. Gu « nther, Rassenkunde des ju«dischen Volkes, Munich 1930. The most comprehensive treatment

of Gu « nther remains that of Hans-Ju « rgen Lutzho « ft, Der nordische Gedanke in Deutschland, 1920-1940,Stuttgart 1971. This account, however, is also a document of its time. See also the more recent Peter

Schwandt, Hans F.K. Gu«nther: Portra«t, Entwicklung und Wirken des rassistisch-nordischen Denkens,Saarbru « cken 2008.41Hans F.K. Gu « nther, Platon als Hu «ter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung

fu «r die Gegenwar t, Munich 1928.42Heinrich Ackermann, Jesus: His Message and its Appropriation in the West , Go « ttingen 1952.




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Indo-European religiosity just mentioned above.43 This shift can be explained as

indicative of an attempt, on Gu « nther’s part, to pinpoint race as the deepest root of

culture and religious form while, at the same time, moving race to the background

of discussion.Without employing a historically unsustainable, idealized distinction between

uncorrupted scholarship and antisemitic writing, Gu « nther’s 1952 study on the

historical Jesus, when compared with his pre-1945 publications, is nevertheless

indicative of important changes in styles of argumentation. On closer examination,

the study conforms to the corpus of theological literature dealing with Jesus that

crystallized in the writings of Ernst Renan,Walter Grundmann, and others.44 The

discussion of Christ’s racial background began in the nineteenth century, when

scholars sought to reconcile Christianity with the growing in£uence of racial

theories that viewed the Jews as members of an inferior race. Susannah Heschelhas recently noted that this line of thinking £ourished in the Protestant theological

discourse of the twentieth century and well into the 1960s and 1970s. Gu « nther

describes Jesus’ non-Jewish childhood in the Galilee.45 He draws on early and

contemporary scholarship, from Renan and Bultmann toJosef Klausner, the latter

a professor at the Hebrew University, and cites Hebrew, Greek and Persian

sources.46

Gu « nther argues that much of Christ’s teaching was based on Semitic religious

beliefs, which were often of non-Jewish origin, that is, they were originally Aryan

ideas developed in Persia and Greece.47 He incorporates some of his earlier

antisemitic notions and themes, such as the interpretation that ‘‘love thy

neighbour’’ referred only to a Jewish neighbour,48 his concern with the emphasis of

Semitic religions on slave-master relations, the portrayal of Semitic forms of belief

as passionate and irrational, and the claim that Hebrew is more a language of

prophecy than philosophy because its syntax lacks the precision of Indo-European

languages.49 Gu « nther employs explicit racial formulations identical to those used

in his racial studies (indeed, he cites his own works).50 He recalls Paul de Lagarde’s

contention that the heart of the Christian Church is found in the Gospels,

especially Saint Paul.51While no less racist, Gu « nther disputes Walter Grundmann’s

view of Paul’s canonical status. The appropriation of Indo-European religious

43Hans F.K. Gu « nther, Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans, transl. byVivian Bird in collaboration withRoger Pearson, Uck¢eld 2001.

44See Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton2008.

45Gu « nther, p. 30.46In the National Socialist period Gu « nther would not cite a Jewish scholar as an authority. The

discussion on the ethnic, racial, and religious di¡erences between Judean and Galilean Jewry/ Judaism of that period is still a major theme in contemporary scholarship. Cf. Sean Freyne, Galileeand Gospel , Go « ttingen 2000.

47

Gu « nther, p. 72.48Ibid., p. 88.49Ibid., p. 139.50Ibid., pp. 136-137.51Ibid., pp. 152-165.




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forms resulted in the replacement of Jewish or Semitic ‘‘revelation’’ with European

‘‘mysticism’’,52 a mysticism that is absent in Semitic religions.‘‘Love thy neighbour’’

was universalized and became the basis of European humanism.53

In his1963 book, Gu « nther states that the‘‘protection of race is both a consequenceand a requirement of the world order ^ a direct assertion of the Indo-European

religious heart’’.54 He quotes early twentieth century scholarly works that elaborate

on the cruelty of Semitic religions.55 He cites his own studies that describe Semitic

religious intolerance as alien to Indo-European religiosity56, as well as links

between the Oriental spirit and the desert.57 Taken at face value, his book is an

academic treatise on the roots of Indo-European religiosity; but its subtext is a

political discussion of race in the present.

Gu « nther did not alter his beliefs but he did alter his mode of argumentation

exemplifying that the transformation of patterns of argumentation do not

necessarily correspond with transformations in belief systems.

PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION

AND UNSTATED BELIEFS

Unlike Rassenkunde, physical anthropology after 1945 may have been politically

marginalized but it remained scienti¢cally unchanged. Consequently, physical

anthropology provides us with our richest source for the confrontation between

taboo and scienti¢c classi¢cation. Three generations of physical anthropologists,

Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (1892-1965), Ilse Schwidetzky (1907-1997) and Rainer

Knuman belong to a single school of racial anthropology, which lasted from the

Weimar period to the 1990s. Eickstedt was the supervisor of Schwidetzky, his

assistant and successor in Mainz. Knuman, one of Schwidetzky’s leading

disciples, became a professor of anthropology at the University of Hamburg.

Precisely because in the National Socialist period Eickstedt was not considered

the leading physical anthropologist in Germany, he was able to establish a more

central place for himself and his pupils after 1945.58 But the ¢eld as a whole was

tainted by its close a⁄liation with National Socialist racial politics and Eickstedtand his followers sought to distance themselves from ‘racial ideology’. In what

might seem today as a paradox, in an attempt to uphold the scienti¢c legitimacy of

physical anthropology (against the allegation that it fell on the side of racial

pseudo-science), anthropologists were driven to justify the validity of their

52Ibid., p. 176, p. 192.53Ibid., p. 197.54Ibid ., p. 47.55Ibid ., p. 57.56

Ibid.57Ibid., p. 60.58See Dirk Preu, Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (1892^1965). Anthropologe und Forschungsreisender. Selbstbild und

Entwicklung der deutschen Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert am Beispiel des Begru «nders der „Breslauer Schule‘‘,2 vols. [unpublished dissertation, University of Jena 2006].




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discipline’s concepts, methods, and forms of human classi¢cation. In this vein

Eickstedt and his pupils insisted that their classi¢cation of Jews was scienti¢cally

rather than ideologically motivated. But as the discussion of Jewish racial

di¡erence was, after 1945, rede¢ned as partaking in antisemitic racial ideology,their discussion was necessarily self-contradictory.

Eickstedt’s writing career on Jews illustrates some of the complexities of the

relationship between race and antisemitism in the twentieth century. Eickstedt,

the founder of the Breslau/Mainz School of physical anthropology, studied and

worked with Felix von Luschan and Eugen Fischer before obtaining an academic

post in Breslau in 1929, where he was awarded a habilitation degree in 1930 and a

teaching post in 1933. As part of his anthropological work on prisoners of war,

Eickstedt reported in January 1916 to von Luschan his only partial success in

measuring qualities of Russian Jews.

59

While his keen interest in measuring Jewstesti¢es that he viewed Jews as a physical (or racial) anthropological group, and in

this sense contributed to their racialization, at this stage it seems likely that he was

not directly motivated by antisemitism. His statements and activities during the

National Socialist period, however, painted in a di¡erent light his earlier activity.

Eickstedt borrowed from Gu « nther the basic typology of European races and the

methodological di¡erentiation between Volk and Rasse, although he inverted their

relationship. Eickstedt’s request to join the National Socialist Party was turned

down (after quarrelling with a local party o⁄cial), but he worked closely with the

party’s political o⁄ce, writing evaluations for the Reichssippenamt (Reich KinshipO⁄ce), and in disputed cases determining whether individuals were ‘full-£edged’

Jews, half-Jews, or quarter-Jews. His scienti¢c views on the Jewish question fell well

within the large mass of antisemitic laws and ideas.60

During the National Socialist period Eickstedt undertook a major

anthropological study of the racial pro¢le of the population in Upper Silesia,

trying to prove the presence of Nordic racial traits that would qualify the

population for Germanization. Eickstedt £ed Breslau/ Wroclaw and obtained a

position at the University of Mainz. The following year he exploited the rejection

of his request for membership of the National Socialist Party by claiming that he

had never been close to the party or its ideology. During the National Socialist

period Eickstedt warned of the Jewish threat in terms of U « berfremdung. After the

war, Eickstedt appropriated the opposition between science and politics and in

1959 wrote that: ‘‘racial madness developed not out of racial studies or racial

knowledge, but out of Rassenunwissen (racial ignorance).’’61 After 1945 his work

makes no mention of theJews, but a direct line runs from Eickstedt to Schwidetzky

59Eickstedt is quoted and discussed in Britta Lange,‘AfterMath: Anthropological Data from Prisoner-of-War Camps’ in Reinhard Johler, Christian Marchetti, Monique Scheer (eds.), Doing Anthropology

in Wartime and War Zones:World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe, Bielefeld 2010, pp. 319-320.60Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, Ausgewa «hlte Lichtbilder zur Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, Begleitheft,2nd edn. 1933, p. 19. Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropologyand Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk, Cambridge 2005, pp. 149-150, 159-160.

61Quoted in Massin, Anthropologie und Humangenetik im Nationalsozialismus, p. 14.




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and Knuman, with whom such statements resurface. Eickstedt also makes no

direct mention of Jews in his truly out of the ordinary book of 1963.62 This book of

over 2500 pages brings together physical anthropology with Heidegger’s

phenomenology and Einstein’s physics (footnoting together Georg Simmel andHans F.K. Gu « nther,63 among many others). The closest he gets to mention Jews is

the reproduction of two photographs of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss to capture

distinct racial essences in movements.64 The latter, which Clauss claims is an Arab

woman, is designated ‘‘Armenider Erlo «sungstypus’’, which encompassed the Jewish

type in Felix von Luschan’s classi¢cation.

Neither Eickstedt nor Schwidetzky altered their racial beliefs after 1945, but

certain important semantic changes are visible. The term ‘race’ was replaced by

Vo «lkerbiologie (population biology) until the early 1960s. Eickstedt re-titled the

revised, enlarged edition of Racial Study and Racial History of Humanity as Forschung

am Menschen (Research on Man). The Journal of Racial Studies was rechristened

Homo in 1949 and became the o⁄cial journal of the German Anthropological

Association.65 Less than two decades after the end of the Second World War,

however, Schwidetzky announced that the time was ripe to re-address the problem

of human races with Neue Rassenkunde (new racial studies).66

Under Eickstedt’s supervision in Breslau, in 1934 Schwidetzky completed her

dissertation on the Polish national movement in Upper Silesia between 1825 and

1914, and was granted a habilitation in 1937 for her treatise on the ancient Slavs.

Schwidetzky frequently contributed articles to Eickstedt’s journal Rassenkunde.67

When Eicksted left for Mainz, he invited her to work with him. In 1961 shesucceeded her mentor as head of the Anthropological Institute, gaining wide

recognition in the following years. Schwidetzky published in the English-language

journal The Mankind Quarterly and other journals considered racist at the time. As

one of the most prominent female academics inWest Germany, she was seen as the

matriarch of German physical anthropology. Only in 1980, on the eve of being

granted an academic award in France, did controversy erupt and student protests

break out over her a⁄liation with the National Socialist Party.68

Benoit Massin criticizes Schwidetzky’s history of racial studies for its blatant

falsi¢cations regarding the discipline’s role in the National Socialist period,especially concerning her own institute’s legal-anthropological involvement in the

racial evaluation of individuals. Particularly interesting in our context is

62I return to the tacit re-introduction of discussion of Jews through older photographs later in thissection. Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, Ursprung und Entfaltung der Seele: Entwurf und System einer psychologischen Anthropologie, Stuttgart 1963. See Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Rasse und Seele. Munich1933, pp.78-81.

63See Eickstedt, n. 2111 on pp. 2466-246764Ibid ., p. 1657 and p. 2256.65Ilse Schwidetzky, Einfu «hrung in die Vo «lkerbiologie, Stuttgart 1950. Eickstedt, Die Forschung.66

See Hofeld, Geschichte der biologischen Anthropologie in Deutschland , p. 406.67Egon von Eickstedt (ed.), with the assistance of Gu « nther Holtz and Ilse Schwidetzky, Ausgewa «hlteLichtbilder zur Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. Erla «uterungen, Stuttgart 1933, pp. 12,15,19-22.

68 Jakob Michelsen, ‘Ilse Schwidetzky’, in Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (eds.), Handbuch der vo «lkischenWissenschaften, Munich 2008, pp. 634-638.




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Schwidetzky’s discussion of Jews in her 1950 book Grundzu«ge derVo«lkerbiologie.69 Here

she focuses on the analysis of wandering as a biological phenomenon

(Wanderbiologie), mentioning Jews numerous times, for example, in discussion of the

Babylonian Exile,70

and in her assessment that a number three or four times biggerthan the current population size of the Jews has been assimilated by their

Wirtsvo «lkern.71 She also discusses the extinction of peoples, claiming that the

selection processes introduced with the Europeanization of the world brought

about the extinction of some peoples but led to an increase in the numbers of

others.72 Hence, while including Jews within her account of wider biological

tendencies, she is careful to avoid mention of their more recent historical fate.

Even more interesting for our purposes, however, are decisions made with regard

to the representation of Jews in the series Rassengeschichte der Menschheit (The Racial

History of Humanity), an extension of Eickstedt’s project, which Schwidetzkyfounded, edited, and to which she contributed.The multi-volume series in German,

English and French was generally arranged geographically according to nation

states. In most of the countries covered ^ including those in Western Europe and

the Americas-Jews were omitted from discussion and passed over as a distinct

racial category. Nonetheless, in three cases they were mentioned as a separate sub-

population: Tunisia, Ukraine, and Germany.73 In the case of Tunisia, the article

notes that Jews arrived in 1492 and lived there until the establishment of the State

of Israel. The article on the Ukraine was based on older statistics in which Jews

were separately classi¢ed. The statistical table was reproduced, but Jews were notdiscussed in the body of the text. This moment exempli¢es precisely what in this

paper is termed a‘small tension’.

Schwidetzky brie£y discussed the Jews in her essay on Germany. She did so

indirectly, noting their absence, in a brief paragraph that dealt with the

evolutionary tendencies of selection, admitting that the impact of the Jewish

people’s annihilation on the German psyche was still unknown. In this way she

alluded toJewish racial di¡erence while eschewing its direct discussion.

The most comprehensive discussion on the Jews in this series is in the section

dealing with the State of Israel, which appears in Wolfram Bernhard’s 1993 volume

on Southwest Asia.74 The account begins after the Second World War and claims

69Ilse Schwidetzky, Grundzu « ge der Vo «lkerbiologie, Stuttgart 1950. The historical book of physicalanthropology criticized by Massin is Ilse Schwidetzy with I. Spiegel-Ro « sing, Maus und Schlange.Untersuchungen zur Lage der deutschen Anthropologie, Munich 1992.

70Ibid., p. 68.71Ibid., p. 108.72Ibid., pp. 276-282.73Viktor V. Bunak, ‘Rassengeschichte Osteuropas,‘ in Ilse Schwidetzky (ed.), Rassengeschichte der

Menschheit: Europa II: Ost- und Nordeuropa, Munich^Vienna 1976, pp. 50, 52. D. Ferembach, ‘Histoireraciale du Sahara septentrional’, in Ilse Schwidetzky (ed.), Rassengeschichte der Menschheit Afrika I:

Nord-und Mittelafrika, Munich^Vienna 1975, pp.164-165. Ilse Schwidetzky, ‘Rassengeschichte vonDeutschland’, in Ilse Schwidetzky (ed.), Rassengeschichte der Menschheit: Europa V: Schweiz, Deutschland,Belgien und Luxemburg, Niederlande, Munich^Vienna 1976, pp. 92-93.

74Wolfram Bernhard, ‘Asien IV: Su «dwestasien’, in Ilse Schwidetzky (ed.), Rassengeschichte der Menschheit ,Munich 1993, pp. 147-177.




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that, following the establishment of the State of Israel, many Jews ‘‘not only from

Europe but also from Middle Eastern countries back-wandered [zuru «ckgewandert ]

to Palestine, where today they make up the majority’’.75 Bernhard emphasized the

di¡erence between the majority of Jews in Israel, who arrived after 1948 from thevarious diasporas, and the minority, whose presence there has remained unbroken

since Biblical times.76 Bernhard provides a racial map in which Israel’s population

is marked ‘ Juden’.

The decision not to discussJews in Europe or the United States but to discussJews in

Israel was not an object of explicit re£ection. Rather, it ensued from a covert form

of negotiation that concerned the boundaries of the discussion of Jewish racial

di¡erence and rendered certain objects legitimate and others taboo.

We have no direct evidence as to whether an editorial decision was made with

regard to the representation of the Jews in the series as a whole and it seems likely

Wolfram Bernhard,‘Asien IV: Su « dwestasien’, in Ilse Schwidetzky (ed.),Rassengeschichte der Menschheit , Munich 1993. With kind permission of

Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag Munich.

75Unlike the term zuru «ckgekehrt (returned), the term zuru «ckgewandert does not have Zionist connotationsbut rather connotes ‘The wandering Jew’, p. 149.

76Ibid., p. 174.




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that it was negotiated tacitly. Either way, Jews no longer appeared as a single meta-

geographical category. If they were discussed, then it was either through the State

of Israel or as a sub-group dispersed among local populations. Importantly, the

discussion of Israel remained linked to historical records, and avoided antisemitictropes or Eickstedt’s and Gu « nther’s older characterizations.

The e¡ect of the taboo on the classi¢cation of the Jews may be appreciated

negatively when compared to a similar case: Gypsies. In a 1939 publication,

Eickstedt ended his discussion of the German people with two Fremdvo «lker (the

literal translation ‘‘two alien peoples or nations’’, does not carry the weight of the

original German): Gypsies andJews.77 While at the exact moment of time in which

this statement was made it had dramatic political implications, scienti¢cally it was

by no means novel.78 While the Sinti and Roma were systematically persecuted

during the National Socialist period, the postwar taboo was not extended to theirdiscussion. Hence after 1945, based on Eickstedt’s same classi¢cation system and

the alleged presence of Indo-Afghanistan and Iran-Afghanistan admixtures, the

discussion on European Gypsies was relegated to a non-European volume in the

series where they appeared as a separate class alongside Australian Aborigines and

the Asiatic population of Indo-China.79

Rainer Knuman’s second edition (1988) of his 1980 textbook provides the last

instance, in this genealogy, of themes, beliefs, or signi¢ers that for most of the

period after 1945 were unstated. A short passage, in particular, sparked a public

controversy, which began with student protests in Hamburg and reached thenational press. In comparison with the earlier opposition that Gu « nther had met,

physical anthropology had only now fallen into disrepute.80

This passage included several antisemitic tropes and signi¢ers (adverse selection,

parasitism, fundamental non-European di¡erence, and responsibility for being

objects of hate) and a speci¢callyWest German frame of discussion (the opposition

between science and ideology in respect to his discipline, underscoring what he

sees as Jews’alleged superior intelligence). But from the perspective of the history of

taboo and classi¢cation an even more interesting aspect is found in Knuman’s use

of photographs.

77Egon von Eickstedt, Die Rassischen Grundlagen des deutschen Volkes, Cologne 1939, pp. 28-31. The Jews,according to Eickstedt, arrived far earlier than the Gypsies, in fact before Germany wasgermanized. But the two peoples are described as accommodated (beherbergt ) by host-peoples(Wirtsvo «lker ). The Jews are characterized as merciless (mitleidslos) and vindictive (rachsu «chtig) p. 30.Their poisonous destructive spirituality (zersetzende Geistigkeit ) and their underlying alien form(Andersartigkeit ) create constant tensions and disharmonies. Eickstedt concluded this section statingthat it is only natural and healthy that all defensive measures against this threatening force shouldbe taken and with full force (‘‘mit aller Kraft ’’), p. 31.

78Cf. A. Buhan,‘Europa’, in Georg Buschan (ed.), Illustrierte Vo «lkerkunde, Stuttgart 1910, p. 346.79

See Jaroslav Suchy, ‘Die Zigeuner’, in Karl Saller (ed.), Australien, Indochina-Indopakistan, Die Zigeuner ,Munich^Vienna 1968, pp. 185-191.80Rainer Knuman, Vergleichende Biologie des Menschen. Ein Lehrbuch der Anthropologie und Humangenetik,

Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 429. For mention of the protests, see ‘Alte Lehre zementiert’, in Der Spiegel no. 20 (12 May 1997), p. 218.




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History of Antisemitism Clasiif of Taboos

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