Racial Science in Hitlers New Europe, 1938-1945 (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology)

Family was another crucial component of biopolitical mythopoeia.

The Christian family ideal was one important quality that eugenicists working with the Union for Family Protection promoted widely. But this ideal was to be understood not only religiously but also biologically, as a worldview gradually guiding the individual and the nation toward a new eugenic harmony. Health experts did not perceive eugenic screening for hereditary and infectious diseases as a solely medical problem. The contagious nature of these diseases strengthened arguments in favor of preventive eugenic measures.

Public health interventions included the prevention and eradication of contagious diseases as well as improved sanitation and housing. It was to be expected, Somogyi concluded, that a law stipulating the creation of a fund for family protection would follow shortly. The Minister of Interior and former prefect of Baranya County, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, assured the House that this Act on the Prevention of Tuberculosis and Venereal Diseases was only the beginning of a broader governmental program of social and biological improvement.

Act VI empowered the Ministry of Interior to coordinate a sociomedical network that included welfare centers, anti—venereal disease control agencies, sexual health experts, hospitals, and clinics. The state, municipalities, and townships as well as insurance companies could establish venereal disease centers. In terms of the themes discussed here, the introduction of Act VI established a clear connection between preventive medicine and ideas of population renewal. Social, medical, and eugenic interests coalesced, thus preparing the ground for the introduction of compulsory medical examinations prior to marriage.

To this end, the medical gaze over the body politic was essential in construing the ideal of a healthy Hungarian nation in relation to ethnicity, pathology, and disease. The state was perceived by eugenicists to have finally taken seriously its duty to promote their long-desired goal of defending the nation against biological and social degeneration. As we shall see in the next section, eugenic ideas of biological improvement also had significant social and economic ramifications.

In the climate of heightened nationalism that characterized the early s, Hungarian elites were called to action by the need to consolidate the newly enlarged state and strengthen its foundations. Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer submitted the proposal to Parliament on June 19, Act XXIII placed a heavy emphasis on improved medical conditions, modern sanitation, and Christian morality, reaffirming the association between the health of the family, child welfare, and social and economic improvement.

Furthermore, the act united state, municipal, and county health services, again under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior. The aim was simply to reduce rural unemployment and increase economic growth while simultaneously encouraging healthy marriages and births. The peasantry was thus valued as the embodiment of racial fertility and national strength. ONCSA was located at the intersection of three major domains: The above-mentioned Ferenc Somogyi argued that ONCSA was not something to be copied from elsewhere, but the synthesis of indigenous eugenic and social welfare traditions.

In this way, ONCSA brought together existing social and biological welfare initiatives, including state projects and social insurance companies, thus facilitating collaboration with local municipal officials and partnership with private institutions and agencies. Positive eugenic thinking was central to this new social welfare system. Reproduction was deemed indispensable to womanhood, while demographic growth was encouraged in practical terms by providing financial incentives and the distribution of land to fathers of large families.

The success of this welfare agenda merged two diverse yet equally important domains — the social and the medical — and their corresponding eugenic epistemologies. It is particularly illuminating that for many politicians, their interest in and support for eugenics sprang from their interest in social welfare. Eugenics always had a strong social component, and eugenicists were always involved with programs of social improvement, combining theory and practice.

This wide medical, social, and economic program illustrates how scientific and social planning became integral to government thinking in s Hungary.

During the early s these eugenic anxieties gained political significance as they were increasingly depicted as symptoms of a broader trend in demographic and racial decline. They expressed not so much a shared conviction in race as a belief in the eugenic desirability of social and biological improvement. Integral to this vision of a resurrected Hungary was the centralization of health and welfare programs so that eugenic ideas of social and biological improvement could be applied uniformly. Eugenicists and their supporters among the political elites believed in the transformative power of science, repeatedly stressing a modern conception of society based on rational planning.

On the one hand, they offered a vision of a healthy Hungarian nation, a task they believed required eugenic reforms. Race was not a factor only in the realm of eugenic representation; it also played an active role in practical politics. By the beginning of , antisemitism, biopolitics, and eugenics were fast transforming Hungarian life. Anthropological, demographic, and eugenic theories were recast as ideological arguments in partisan disputes over the regained — but continually contested — territories.

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Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany provided powerful eugenic models to emulate, contributing expertise and guidance to Hungarian policy makers concerned with population control and management. Eugenics was deemed essential to the demographic, social, and welfare policies of the Hungarian state during the s. Various eugenic idioms were invoked by EPOL to justify the need to redefine the biological relationship of the individual to the state. Biologism provided the overarching biopolitical philosophy that could unite disparate strands of Hungarian eugenics.

The idea of a national institute was a long-standing aim of Hungarian eugenicists. Hungarian nationalist tradition and biopolitics became closely intertwined. The institute consisted of ten departments, each with its own director, dealing with a particular areas of research: To ignore the complex interplay of hereditary factors shaping the national body was to misconceive its complicated biological existence and endanger not only its physical but also its intellectual future.

The eugenic concern with the health of the nation took several forms. After briefly discussing positive eugenics, Doros turned to a detailed discussion of negative eugenics. He identified seven negative eugenic practices: To many Hungarian eugenicists the two perspectives on social and biological improvement were not fundamentally separated, for they considered biological knowledge an arena in which they could achieve political authority and social legitimacy.

By the early s, Hungarian eugenicists advocated a national welfare program that they believed was not only necessary but also realistic. Undoubtedly Teleki believed in the existence of biological races, but his ideas on social and eugenic improvement seriously questioned the epistemological authority of racism. An avid reader of scientific literature on evolution and biology, Teleki was directly involved in the eugenic movement before In fact, he is the only known president of a eugenics society ever to have become prime minister.

Reworking a broad set of eugenic discourses on the quality and quantity of the population, Teleki ultimately integrated the concepts of national community quantitative population policy , race quality , and gender men: In most of his public lectures and publications, Teleki promoted a scientific pedagogy grounded in a number of academic disciplines, most prominently geography, anthropology, and biology.

Repeatedly weaving progressive thoughts on national education with eugenic theories, Teleki was explicit about the practical measures that the government ought to take to improve the racial quality of the nation. Crucially, any project of practical eugenics was linked to political processes and state policies. Act XV of combined two separate sources, one narrowly ideological and programmatic antisemitism , the other broadly medical, social, and eugenic.

As a form of detection and protection against tuberculosis and venereal diseases, medical examinations before marriages would medically and eugenically safeguard the national community, not least in ethnically mixed areas. Similar arguments were offered in the Upper House. Compulsory medical examination before marriage was the most important element of this proposal. In its final version, Act XV of was divided into six sections and sixteen articles: Different traditions of eugenic welfare, social engineering, and racial antisemitism informed this law: Act XV of restricted marriage to healthy partners.

Those suffering from tuberculosis, venereal diseases, and various genetic diseases were refused permission to marry. ONCSA was similarly included. According to the fifth article: Within the newly formed Greater Hungary, the political goal of the act was to increase economic productivity and social integration, ultimately sustaining local and regional programs of eugenic betterment. Act XV of must, therefore, be understood not only within the context of growing antisemitism in Hungary but also within that of an all-encompassing national vision of eugenic renewal proposed by Hungarian politicians like Teleki.

This was both a biological and a political project. It should be acknowledged, as argued here, that Hungarian biopolitics, as it emerged during the s, envisioned a dual function for the newly enlarged state: As well as bringing the nation and the state together — indeed, synthesizing them — Act XV also justified eugenics as a philosophy of social and biological regeneration.

Increasingly, as in other European countries, eugenicists in Hungary hoping for racial betterment, social protection, and a modern welfare state viewed the Hungarian race less as a cultural and spiritual entity based on common history, language, and tradition and more as a community of blood. Moreover, they racialized the future of the national community, a future they deemed unsuitable not only for those deemed eugenically unworthy but also for those labeled as internal enemies: At the beginning of the s, Hungary was progressively becoming a racial state.

Theirs was a vision of a homogeneous national community empowered by racial strength, eugenic pronatalism, and the remarkable personal experience of witnessing the reunification with territories lost after World War I. Debates over the historical destiny of the Hungarian nation during the early s came to rely not only on arguments about language and culture but increasingly on assumptions about race, racial types, and specific racial characteristics. Ultimately, the nationalization of eugenics and its corollary, the biologization of national belonging, produced a new type of ideologue: The sources from which Hungarian political culture drew its sustenance in the crucial years of and need to be studied more rigorously.

By unveiling the eugenic dimension of these three laws — Acts VI and XXIII of and Act XV of , respectively — we can finally see how the forces that contributed to the vision of Greater Hungary that was elaborated during this period were more intricately rooted within a native biopolitical culture than is currently recognized by current scholarship on twentieth-century Hungary.

Eugenic measures, such as premarital certification and compulsory health screening, shaped the national environment in which ideas of social and biological improvement could generate a new vision of Greater Hungary. Defining the nation in eugenic terms was therefore not just a form of racism; it was the expression of a larger attempt to create a healthy Hungarian society.

During the Second World War, Hungary fought to preserve its newly acquired territories. But Hungarian political elites also had to forge social, economic, cultural, and biological strategies while confronting the twin threats of world war and domestic political radicalization. New agendas of individual and collective regeneration were articulated as a means of conveying national unity and political aspirations. The deployment of eugenic discourses and practices was shaped both directly by the political and social objectives of Hungarian nationalism and indirectly by a selective imitation of Nazi and fascist models of eugenic renewal.

I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the JMH , from whom I received valuable advice and criticism. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author manuscript; available in PMC Mar 1.

In this Book

Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes University;. Social Welfare and Rural Communities In the climate of heightened nationalism that characterized the early s, Hungarian elites were called to action by the need to consolidate the newly enlarged state and strengthen its foundations. Race and Applied Eugenics Race was not a factor only in the realm of eugenic representation; it also played an active role in practical politics. Conclusion Debates over the historical destiny of the Hungarian nation during the early s came to rely not only on arguments about language and culture but increasingly on assumptions about race, racial types, and specific racial characteristics.

For a sample of the variegated and multilingual scholarship on this subject, see: Arrow-Cross Men, National Socialists, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Rumania. Die Pfeilkreuzlerbewegung in Ungarn: Historiker Kontext, Entwicklung, und Herrschaft. In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe. Historiography on the Holocaust in Hungary is vast. See, especially, Weindling Paul J. Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.

Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. The Ideology of Nation and Race: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice. Health, Hygiene, and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to For a classical treatment see: Egy jellegzetes magyar fasiszta szervezet, University of Debrecen; Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe. For a Hungarian perspective, see: In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, Burleigh, Wippermann The Racial State. The role of health and disease in racial politics throughout Europe during the s requires more critical analysis.

1. U.S. Presidents (Ken Jennings’ Junior Genius Guides).
2. In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940-1941.
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4. Die Stille ist ein Geräusch: Eine Fahrt durch Bosnien (German Edition).
5. Chronicles of Mark Johnson;
6. Wild Is The Wind.

For a recent discussion, see: The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Germany. Towards a History of Social Work in Europe. The Case of the Productive Social Policy; pp. A History of Modern Hungary, More recent discussions in Frank Tibor. Treaty Revision and Doublespeak: Ideas on Territorial Revision in Hungary: For a recent analysis, see: The issues raised by these political events have spanned a literature far too extensive to be covered here.

For a more general trend in Central Europe dictated by Nazi Germany, see: German Resettlement and Population Policy, Information provided in Rothschild Joseph. It would take me far afield to embark here on even a cursory presentation of this line of demographic thought in Hungarian political culture. For an excellent overview, see: Hungarian Minorities and Central Europe: Regionalism, National, and Religious Identity.

Restocking the Ethnic Homeland: The Holocaust in Northern Transylvania. Department K 28, ME, Hermann Goering rose as one of the Nazi triumvirate, second only to Hitler.

Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, - Google Книги

The elder Goering was among the first to confront the Herero. For decades, a main street in the Southwest African settlement immortalized his name — Heinrich Goering Street. Franz Ritter von Epp was an early leading figure of the Third Reich. He formed the Freikorps Epp in , which was one of the many street fighting units that evolved into the Nazis. Von Epp hired a young informant named Adolf Hitler. During special ceremonial meetings with leaders, such as Mussolini, von Epp was in photos next to Hitler or other ranking Nazis.

Who was von Epp? Von Epp was one of the earlier volunteer German fighters in the Schutztruppe that fought the Herero in Southwest Africa. He served as a company commander under von Trotha, and stayed on as concentration camps were established. Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer murderous eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Fischer steered racial pseudoscience into a war of extermination.

In , Fischer declared in a lecture: The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. The list of Southwest African soldiers, colonial overseers, and commercial settlers and their prominent involvement in the Nazi movement is long and odious. Fischer had launched his career in race science with a study of interbreeding between the Nama and Dutch settlers.

Working arduously in such concentration camps as Shark Island, Fischer ordered hundreds of executed inmates to be decapitated.

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Herero women were required to remove all flesh from the heads using shards of glass, to create clean skulls suitable for shipment. So celebrated were these skull shipments, a popular color postcard sporting a photograph of the packing process was published in Germany in commemoration of the ghastly endeavor. A much shorter list of Nazi concepts and mechanisms carries a more than eerie relation to the Southwest Africa genocide. The Nazi conceptualization of untermenschen is often traced to the American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, a close colleague of Margaret Sanger and a director of her American Birth Control League, a forerunner organization of Planned Parenthood.

The Menace of the Under-man. Later, many historians thought this vocabulary triggered the German adoption. However, the racial view that Africans were actually not humans, but rather sub-humans first appears in German usage in Southwest Africa. One German in Southwest Africa wrote: African people were commonly thought of as talking monkeys by many eugenicists worldwide. The New York Times brushed off criticism by African American ministers of the day, stating in an editorial: The pygmies… are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place… from which he could draw no advantage whatever.

The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date. The addition to German vocabulary of the term untermenschen as an intellectual fundamental did not arise in Berlin, but in Southwest Africa. Jews were dispatched to concentration camps across Europe in cattle cars. These trains were dubbed Transport.

For Germany, the process had happened once before — in Southwest Africa, to expedite the transfer of un-killed Hereros to be worked to death. The Third Reich established thousands of concentration camps and sub-camps where so many Jews were confined under inhuman conditions or were sent to be industrially killed. The German word for such sites was Konzentrationslager. In the last years of the nineteenth century, civilians in conflict were subjected to the same treatment. Deprived of food and transformed into staggering skeletons, more than , Cubans died.

Hence, for Germany, the linguistic and structural model of the Konzentrationslager originated not in the Nazi mind but in the Southwest African colony. For Germany, the process had happened once before. In Southwest Africa, to expedite the transfer of un-killed Hereros to be worked to death, the Germans loaded them into cattle cars. Germany called those particular Herero transit trains Transport. It was uttered first in German by Georg Hartmann in Ironically, the first time Germans began using the term Rassenschande was in Southwest Africa when, in , they enacted never-before-seen regulations against intermarriage between Africans and Europeans.

Back in Germany, during those colonial and Great War years, the African precedent was debated — and often lauded — in the Reichstag for implementation in the Fatherland. Once the Nazis came to power, however, precedents set in Southwest African were enacted in Germany. During the Hitler years, hundreds of thousands of Jews and other enemies of the state were held in concentration camps. The card followed each inmate from site to site. IBM kept track of all the cards and numbers. In the popular mindset of Nazi-era Germans, the callous exploits of Southwest Africa were cherished recent memory.

Popular trading cards included some for Southwest Africa. Historians of the period have noted that numerous bestsellers of the day offered Southwest African themes. A plethora of popular movies stoked collective African memories, such as the minute Deutsches Land in Afrika, screened in and re-released in a shorter version under the title The Dream of Lost Colonies. No wonder the image of a giant ape capturing a blonde in the international hit King Kong caused panic in some quarters of Germany. When Jesse Owens, grandson of a slave, triumphed over Aryan athletes, garnering a record four medals in the Olympic Games in Berlin, his victory was more than an Olympic feat — it was a prodigious defeat for the long-held German concept of racial hierarchy.

Once German Jews were exposed in their professions, they were summarily fired. They arrived in a nation still staggering under its Depression, and deeply veined with both the scourge of segregation and the sting of anti-Semitism. More than 50 German-Jewish academics relocated to a number of historically black colleges and universities, such as Howard University in Washington, D. Refugee professors helped set the stage for the intellectual movement to come. His sociology student Ladner excelled and ultimately became a board member of the American Sociological Association as well as interim president of Howard University.

As for Borinski, he is remembered for fighting Jim Crow all his years in Mississippi. When he died, he was buried on the Tougaloo Campus. His tombstone reads simply: Another African American student is Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who went from being mentored by a German-Jewish professor to a distinguished career in medicine. In , she became Surgeon General of the United States. They found a place where they could make a difference.

The transfer of courage was not limited to academia. While some German Jews in the pre-war years were able to manage their immigration from Germany, thousands of Afro-Germans could not. After World War I, so-called mulattos and others of mixed African-German parentage lived in Germany as ordinary German citizens despite the race hatred. The numbers are approximate, but it is thought that by , the Afro-German population numbered some 20, Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian diplomat and a German woman, was among those who wanted to sign up with his local branch of the Hitler Youth, just like the rest of his schoolmates.

Young Hans was astonished to discover that the Nuremburg Laws, defining German blood and racial status, applied to him — denying him admittance. His teacher reluctantly told him that joining the Hitler Youth was now impossible. From that moment on, Massaquoi learned to live with the twin fears that the Gestapo would knock on his door or that Allied bombs would rain down on the roof.

His life was trebly precarious. After the war, Massaquoi was able to emigrate to the United States, where he became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. In Chicago, he took a job with Jet Magazine and then Ebony, where he rose to become the managing editor. For years he served with distinction, chronicling the saga of civil rights giants such as Dr. King and Muhammad Ali. Afro-Germans were under constant threat in Nazi Germany. The Reich was adamant that their bloodlines be terminated. Some offspring were traced to the African colonies. But those with a clear lineage to occupying French African colonial soldiers or American troops were the most detested among Nazi policymakers.

These mulatto children were created either through rape or by white mothers who were whores. In either case, there is no moral obligation whatsoever to this progeny of an alien race. Because they were German citizens, the regime concluded that deportation or expulsion was impractical. Instead, Berlin decided to eliminate the group through sterilization. However, under the mandatory sterilization law, African descent was not listed as a justification. So in , a secret working group was ordained, Special Commission Number 3, led by Fischer and two colleagues.

Genealogies were evaluated one by one to prove ancestry to French-African or African American parentage. A typical evaluation read: Implementation finally began in after the triumphant visit of Jesse Owens. Once WWII broke out, the Germans were not willing to limit their animus toward the black race to sterilization. In wartime, mass murder was the frequent solution. Generally speaking, Allied POWs in Nazi custody were treated according to the Geneva Convention, except those of the Russian army who were, in some situations, killed in large numbers.

A second exception was the treatment of black soldiers, either from France or the United States. Scholarship is still emerging, but it is thought no direct order mandated the murder of black soldiers. But when captured, there were many instances of massacre. Those sent to POW camps were often, but not always, singled out for special brutal treatment. Certainly, French Africans, the Senegalese Tirailleurs, suffered great losses.

Some scholars believe the total killed, either in captivity or in combat, is between 55, and 60, The record of African American GIs is even more obscure. Historians reviewing the events of have discovered a case in Salzburg. The SS shot African American airmen as a group. In Budapest, the Gestapo hanged three pilots. On September 1, , the SS murdered eleven young artillerymen of the rd Field Artillery Battalion FAB after they surrendered from their hiding place in a private home.

Despite this, Washington did not quickly investigate this war crime. It seems their horrible deaths were not a priority for the Pentagon. Only after villagers came forth with their memories was their fate acknowledged, publicity inaugurated, and a monument built. It is the only monument to black soldiers in Europe. But certainly there should be more. It is thought that several African American units were among those who liberated the concentration camps where many emaciated Jews were rescued from the membrane that divides life and death.

In the last days of the war, the st helped liberate Gunskirchen, a cruelly operated Mauthausen subcamp for Hungarian Jews. Many of the liberators came away with nightmares and then had to face bitter segregation in post-war America. Many Jews studiously track the post-war Nazi legacy, and its impact on Arab Countries as well as the details of escaped Nazi SS, Gestapo, and camp guards to Latin America and other havens.

The scourge of Nazi eugenics found a welcome and official embrace in 27 states. A total of some 67, coercive sterilizations targeted many groups, including disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After Hitler came to power, the Americans took a back seat and tried to emulate Nazi policy in the United States.

North Carolina was just one example. He worked in conjunction with the Municipal Court of Chicago, distributing a massive guidebook to passing similar legislation — found constitutional — in every state in the Union. He was also a principal conduit for Nazi eugenic theories in the United States. In , Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for helping devise the Nuremberg Law formulas that designated who was a full Jew and who possessed just a fraction of Jewish blood.

North Carolina eugenic officials also worked closely with the Human Betterment Foundation, a collection of openly rabid Nazi stalwarts located in Pasadena, California. Human Betterment Foundation founder and president E. After a trip to Nazi Germany, Goethe wrote: About 7, North Carolinians were sterilized. Exactly how many were African American is not completely certain, as the shame kept many in the shadows. But it is known that African American women were disproportionately selected for ligation.

The imposed sterilizations continued into the s, long after Hitler fell. To bring Nazi-style ethnic cleansing to Connecticut in an organized, scientific fashion. The plan was to trace the ancestry of all 1. Investigation should include … their origin, numbers and interracial mixtures, and rates of increase. Reciprocal legislation between states was envisioned. Five measures were cited: Among the many ancestral states long under particular scrutiny for their freed slaves were Kentucky, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina.

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If the notion spread, similar deportation policies would be adopted by other states. The plan took its first step with mass registration of nearly all 2, citizens of the town of Rocky Hill, Connecticut. About half of them were fingerprinted. But the mass deportations, recipient-state incarceration camps, and euthanasia mills never happened. World War II broke out in Nazi atrocities and eugenic fascism shocked the world. We have only begun to chart the impact of German policy on those of African descent.