Eugen Fischer - Nazi Views

Nazi Views

Günther Brandt (accessory to murder of foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922) said that "the director of the institute is 'spiritually a nationalistic man through and through, ' who would 'soon be entirely pervaded by the National Socialist spirit if he were only influenced properly.'"

"That Fischer yielded to the pressure of his political patron and made active efforts to join the party from mid-1938 on was probably also a matter of calculation, and closely connected with his plans for reorganizing the institute, which were not to be realized without strong political cover. Reichführer SS Heinrich Himmler, when asked for an opinion by the staff of the office of the Führer's deputy, offered support for Fischer and Lenz in 1938 ... " Ultimately, with additional backing from Martin Bormann, Fischer officially became a Nazi on 12/12/1939.

Even though Fischer did not officially join the Nazi Party until 1940, he was influential with National Socialists early on. A two-volume work, Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene, co-written by him, Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz, served as the "scientific" basis for Nazism's attitude toward other races.

He authored The Rehoboth Basters (Bastards) and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans (1913) (German: Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen), a field study which aimed to determine whether human heredity followed the Mendelian laws by studying the interbreeding of two very different human races, Europeans and Africans, in a small population (3000 individuals) whose family history was well known. This population was the product of Cape Colony Dutch settlers and indigenous African women, located in the area of modern-day Namibia. Fischer demonstrated that such interbreeding did not result in a new, intermediate race that was reproductively stable, but rather followed the Mendelian laws, according to which each generation would produce throw-backs to the original parent races as well as individuals of intermediate type, in the proportion A + 2AB + B, where A and B represent different alleles of a single gene. Although it is sometimes falsely claimed, for instance in the "Holocaust Encyclopedia", that Fischer's study of the Rehoboth Bastards provided context for later racial debates, influenced German colonial legislation and provided "scientific" support for the Nuremberg laws, it was in fact a work of legitimate physical anthropology, without any element of racialist ideology.

In the years of 1937-1938 Fischer and his colleagues analysed 600 children in Nazi Germany descending from French-African soldiers who occupied western areas of Germany after First World War; all children were illegally subjected to sterilization afterwards