Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Jan Klimkowski]

(The FASEB Journal. 2008;22:332-337.

German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust
François Haas1

New York University Institute of Community Health and Research, New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA

1 Correspondence: 400 East 34th St., RR114, New York, NY 10016, USA. E-Mail: francois.haas@med.nyu.edu

ABSTRACT

The Nazi’s cornerstone precept of "racial hygiene" gave birth to their policy of "racial cleansing" that led to the murders of millions. It was developed by German physicians and scientists in the late 19th century and is rooted in the period’s Social Darwinism that placed blacks at the bottom of the racial ladder. This program was first manifested in the near-extermination of the African Herero people during the German colonial period. After WWI, the fear among the German populace that occupying African troops and their Afro-German children would lead to "bastardization" of the German people formed a unifying racial principle that the Nazis exploited. They extended this mind-set to a variety of "unworthy" groups, leading to the physician-administered racial Nuremberg laws, the Sterilization laws, the secret sterilization of Afro-Germans, and the German euthanasia program. This culminated in the extermination camps.—Haas, F. German Science and Black Racism—Roots of the Nazi Holocaust.

GERMANY’S COLONIAL PERIOD

Nazi policy was actually presaged prior to WWI in Germany’s African colonies. The native populations were regarded as inferior and treated in kind, and racism was institutionalized. Indigenous populations were coerced into forced labor in Togo, Cameroon, and South West Africa (Namibia), but conditions reached their peak in the latter under Namibia’s first governor, Heinrich Ernst Goering (father of Hitler’s deputy Herman Goering).

Among the populations inhabiting this colony were the more than 80,000 Hereros (10) , who rebelled against their German overlords in 1904. The Germans sent an army under Lothar von Trotha who called the conflict a "race war." He declared in the German press that "no war may be conducted humanely against non-humans" (11) and issued an "annihilation order":

...The Hereros are no longer German subjects. All Hereros must leave the country...or die. All Hereros found within the German borders with or without weapons, with or without animals will be killed. I will not accept a woman nor any child. ...There will be no male prisoners. All will be shot (11) .

That order set this racial genocide apart from other colonial mass murders and heralded the Nazi final solution (11) .

As would occur under the Nazis, these killings were often framed in public health rhetoric. Von Trotha wrote, "I think it is better that the Herero nation perish rather than infect our troops...." By the time his order was rescinded, an estimated 65,000 Hereros had been killed (12) . The remaining 15,000 (mostly women) were interned in Konzentrationslager.3 Germany’s first official use of this term occurred when Chancellor von Bülow rescinded the annihilation order and established camps for the survivors (11) which were designed to extract economic benefits from their forced labor under conditions that would lead to mass fatalities (12) . The Herero uprising was eventually followed by the Nama (called Hottentots at that time) and Kaffirs.

Fritz Isaac states under oath:4 ‘...I was sent to Shark Island by the Germans. We remained...one year. 3,500 Nama and Kaffirs were sent to the Island and 193 returned. 3,307 died on the Island’

Samuel Kariko states under oath: ‘There were only a few thousands of us left, and we were walking skeletons. ...The people died there like flies that had been poisoned. The great majority died there. The little children and the old people died first, and then the women and weaker men (13) ’

Almost half of the approximate 17,000 natives incarcerated in the concentration camps died (11) . These camps, abolished only in 1908 (10) , were a template for the Nazi extermination and forced labor camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, respectively.

The African colonies and concentration camps also served racial scientific inquiry. Post-mortems were performed to study causes of death and bodies of executed prisoners were preserved and shipped to Germany for dissection (Fig. 1 , (14) ). A 1907 chronicle reported that: "A chest of Herero skulls was recently sent to the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements (10) ."


Figure 1
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Figure 1. Head of a Nama man who died at Shark Island concentration camp, Namibia, which was sent to Germany for anthropological "research" (14) (with permission, E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung http://www.schweizerbart.de).

Probably the most well-known study was the physician Eugen Fisher’s evaluation of Basters,5 the mixed-blood children of Dutch men and Nama women. He argued that "Negro blood" was of "lesser value" and that mixing it with "white blood" would destroy European culture, and advised that Africans should be exploited by Europeans as long they were useful, after which they could be eliminated (15) .

Fisher went on to co-author the seminal Outline of Human Genetic and Racial Hygiene with Fritz Lenz and Edwin Baur. Echoes appear in Hitler’s Mien Kampf (Hitler had been given a copy while in jail and writing Mein Kampf) and eventually in the Nuremberg racial laws6 forbidding marriage and sexual relations between Germans and "unfit" groups (Jews, Sinti, Roma, and Africans) (3) , and in the sterilization laws. Fisher became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and served on commissions that planned for the sterilization of Afro-Germans and provided scientific testimony on the racial heritage of German citizens (11) .

Fisher summarized the role of racial hygiene in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: "It is rare and special good fortune for a theoretical science to flourish at a time when...its findings can immediately serve the policy of the state (16) ."

Full article online here:
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/22/2/332