1 - Introduction

Summary

In December 1941, Eugen Fischer, a leading anthropologist of the Nazi Reich, visited the occupied city of Paris. As founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Fischer delivered a lecture entitled “Problems of race and racial legislation in Germany” at the Maison de la chimie, a noted center of collaborationist propaganda. Fischer was not the first who had come to spread the word to the French about the National Socialist revolution in applied human biology. Earlier in the year, Otmar von Verscheurer, the Frankfurt geneticist whose pupils included the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, spoke on human heredity and Nazi marriage laws, and others during the year lectured on “Public health in the reich” and “Biology and the organization of the state.”

Fischer admitted at the beginning of his talk that he had chosen his topic because “racial problems and German racial legislation are often the subjects of the greatest incomprehension by foreigners.” His aim was not only to explain the laws but also to persuade the French to join the Germans in their campaign to preserve the “hereditary health” of the population. He did this in part by flattery, telling his audience of the superiority of “the race called ‘Nordic,’ to which a great proportion of the French population also belongs.” Fischer also played on racial fears, warning that

French laws and institutions permit black blood to infiltrate the organism of the French people … [producing] a regression of the intellectual and cultural capacity of France that will have absolutely unavoidable consequences if the mixing continues to spread on a vast scale.