Hans F. K. Günther
Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer and eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as Race Günther or Race Pope. He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought. He taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg, writing numerous books and essays on racial theory. Günther's Short Ethnology of the German People was a popular exposition of Nordicism. In May 1930, he was appointed to a new chair of racial theory at Jena. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 as the only leading racial theorist to join the party before it assumed power in 1933.
Life and career
Günther was the son of a musician. He studied comparative linguistics at Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, but also attended lectures on zoology and geography. In 1911, he spent a semester at the Sorbonne, Paris. He attained his doctorate in 1914. In the same year he enlisted in the infantry at the outbreak of World War I, but became sick and was hospitalized. He was declared unfit for combat, so to compensate for his inability to fight, he served with the Red Cross.In 1919, after the end of the war, he started his writing career. He wrote a polemical work entitled "The Knight, death and the devil: the heroic idea", a reworking of the tradition of German Pagan-Nationalist Romanticism into a form of "biological nationalism". Heinrich Himmler was very impressed by this book. In 1922 Günther studied at the University of Vienna while working in a museum in Dresden. In 1923 he moved to Scandinavia to live with his second wife, who was Norwegian. He received scientific awards from the University of Uppsala and the Swedish Institute for Race Biology, headed by Herman Lundborg. In Norway he met Vidkun Quisling. In May 1930 he was appointed to the University of Jena by Wilhelm Frick who had become the first NSDAP minister in a state government when he was appointed minister of education in the right-wing coalition government formed in Thuringen following an election in December 1929. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Berlin, teaching race science, human biology and rural ethnography. From 1940 to 1945 he was professor at Albert Ludwigs University.
He received several honors during the Third Reich, notably in 1935 he was declared "pride of the NSDAP" for his scientific work. In the same year he received the Rudolph Virchow plaque, and in 1940 the Goethe Medal for arts and science from Hitler. In March 1941, he was received as an honored guest for the opening conference of Alfred Rosenberg's "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question". At the conference the obliteration of Jewish identity, or "people death" of the Jews was discussed. Various proposals were made, including the "pauperization of European Jews and hard labor in massive camps in Poland". Günther's only recorded comment was that the meeting was boring.
After World War II, Günther was placed in internment camps for three years until it was concluded that, though he was a part of the Nazi system, he was not an instigator of its criminal acts, making him less accountable for the consequences of his actions. The University of Freiburg came to his defense at his post-war trial. Nevertheless, even after Nazi Germany's fall, he did not revise his thinking, denying the Holocaust until his death. In 1951 he published the book How to choose a husband in which he listed good biological qualities to look for in marriage partners. He continued to argue that sterilization should remain a legal option, and played down the mandatory sterilization used in Nazi Germany. Another eugenics book was published in 1959 in which he argued that unintelligent people reproduce too numerously in Europe, and the only solution was state-sponsored family planning.
Racial theories
Günther's theories arose from the Nordicist ideology prevalent at the time. Eugen Fischer, the professor of anthropology in Freiburg, was an influential proponent of these ideas and had lectured at Albert Ludwigs University when Günther studied there.He wrote that a race could be identified in the following manner.
This definition of "race" was used in Nazi propaganda.
Günther in his writings was quick to mark out the distinction between "race" and "Volk". He acknowledged that both the Germans and Jews were not "races" in the strictest sense of the word but thought that it would cause no harm to refer to the latter as such in non-scientific popular racial works. Similarly, he rejected the usage of "Aryan" and "Semitic" as racial terms and stated that regarding them as such would cause more problems in distinguishing between Germans and Jews.
Günther described in a chapter of one of his works "Racial Characteristics of the Jewish People" that Jews belonged predominantly to the "Near Eastern Race". He thought that Jews had become so racially mixed that they could possibly be regarded as a "race of the second order". He described Ashkenazi Jews as being mixed of Near Eastern, Oriental, East Baltic, Inner-Asian, Nordic, Hamite, and Negro, and Sephardic Jews as being mixed of Oriental, Near Eastern, Western, Hamite, Nordic, and Negro. He believed that Jews had different physical characteristics to Europeans.
Günther in his 1927 book The Racial Elements of European History outlined the differences between racial and linguistic definitions:
's 1920s map showing the distribution of the races of Europe according to Günther's theories, with the Nordic race shown in bright red; light brown indicates the Dinaric race; light blue indicates the Mediterranean race; orange, the Alpine race; purplish-brown, the East Baltic race; dark brown, the Oriental race; green, the Hither Asiatic race; yellow, the Mongoloid/Inner Asiatic race; and black, the Black race.
Günther divided the European population into six races, the Nordic, Phalic, Eastern, Western, Dinaric and East Baltic. "Western" and "Eastern" were, in practice, alternatives for the more widely used terms "Mediterranean" and "Alpine". The "Phalic" race was a minor category dropped in many of his writings.
Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes categorized Germans as belonging to the Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine and East Baltic races. In the book, he argued for Germans to avoid race mixing.
Opposed to the Nordics were the Jews, who were "a thing of ferment and disturbance, a wedge driven by Asia into the European structure." Günther argued that the Nordic peoples should unite to secure their dominance.
Although Günther seemed to admire Mediterraneans and Dinarics, as well as the highly praised Nordics, the East Baltic race was considered inferior in nearly every instance Günther mentioned it in his book, The Racial Elements of European History.
Günther believed Slavic people to be of an "Eastern race" separate from Germany and Nordics and warned about mixing "German blood" with Slavic one.
Among Günther's disciples was Bruno Beger who, after the 1938–39 German expedition to Tibet, concluded that the Tibetan peoples had characteristics that placed them between the Nordic and Mongol races, and were thus superior to other East Asians.