Eugen Fischer


Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and also served as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.
Fischer's ideas informed the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which served to justify the Nazi Party's belief in German racial superiority to other "races", and especially the Jews. Adolf Hitler read Fischer's work while he was imprisoned in 1923 and he used Fischer's eugenic and racist notions to support the ideal of a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Biography

Fischer was born in Karlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden, in 1874. He studied medicine, folkloristics, history, anatomy, and anthropology in Berlin, Freiburg and Munich. In 1918, he joined the Anatomical Institute in Freiburg in 1918, part of the University of Freiburg.
In 1927, Fischer became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, a role for which he'd been recommended the prior year by Erwin Baur.
In 1933 Fischer signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed him rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin, now Humboldt University. Fischer retired from the university in 1942.
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a student of Fischer.
After the war, he completed his memoirs, it is believed that in them he lessened his role in the genocidal programme of the Third Reich. He died in 1967.

Early work

In 1906, Fischer conducted field research in German South West Africa. He studied the Basters, offspring of German or Boer men who had fathered children by the native women in that area. His study concluded with a call to prevent a "mixed race" by the prohibition of "mixed marriage" such as those he had studied. It included unethical human experimentation on the Herero and Namaqua people. He argued that while the existing Mischling descendants of the mixed marriages might be useful for Germany, he recommended that they should not continue to reproduce. His recommendations were followed and by 1912 interracial marriage was prohibited throughout the German colonies. As a precursor to his experiments on Jews in Nazi Germany, he collected bones and skulls for his studies, in part from medical experimentation on African prisoners of war in Namibia during the Herero and Namaqua Genocide.
His racist ideas related to maintaining the apparent purity of races, influenced future German Nazi legislation on race, including the notorious and racist Nuremberg laws.
In 1927, Fischer was a speaker at the World Population Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Nazi Germany

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 and known as the Rhineland Bastards; the children were subsequently subjected to sterilization.
Fischer did not officially join the Nazi Party until 1940. However, he was influential with National Socialists early on. Adolf Hitler read his two-volume work, Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene while incarcerated in 1923 and used its ideas in Mein Kampf. He also authored The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans , a field study which provided context for later racial debates, influenced German colonial legislation and apparently provided "scientific" support for the blatantly racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws.
Under the Nazi regime, Fischer developed the physiological specifications such as skull dimensions used apparently to determine racial origins and developed the so-called Fischer–Saller scale for hair colour. He and his team experimented on Gypsies and African-Germans, taking blood and measuring skulls to find scientific validation for his now discredited theories. After directing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, he was succeeded by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who tutored Josef Mengele when he was active at Auschwitz.
Efforts to return the Namibian skulls taken by Fischer were started with an investigation by the University of Freiburg in 2011 and completed with the return of the skulls in March 2014.
In 1944 Fischer intervened in an attempt to get his friend Martin Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher, released from service in the Volkssturm militia. However, Heidegger had already been released from service when Fischer's letter arrived.

Works

1909 to 1949