Kaiser's Holocaust (46 page)

Fischer’s role, like that of many prominent racial anthropologists and experts in race hygiene, was not merely to support the racial revolution in their papers and at the lectern. He also played a practical role in the building of the ‘racial state’. Alongside Jews and Gypsies, another racial group whom the Nazis wanted removed from the German ‘community of blood’ were the ‘Rhineland Bastards’.

At the end of World War I, the French army that had occupied the western Rhinelands of Germany included several thousand troops of various races from across France’s colonies. When these units took up their duties within the army of occupation, an international campaign against them was launched. They were condemned as ‘Senegalese savages’; the occupation itself was attacked (by a British journalist) as ‘The Black Horror on
the Rhine’. In Germany, the campaign spread lurid and unsubstantiated allegations that the black troops had embarked on a spree of rapes and attacks on German women. When the French withdrew in 1921, the focus of German outrage fell on around four hundred mixed-race children left behind. Although mere infants, they were seen as racial outsiders and living reminders of Germany’s humiliation and defeat. Reflecting Eugen Fischer’s now widely accepted terminology, they were named the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ and both they and their white mothers were subjected to years of abuse and discrimination.

Within just three months of coming to power the Nazis turned their attentions to the ‘Rhineland Bastards problem’. In April 1933 Hermann Göring ordered that the local authorities collect information on their numbers and whereabouts. Churches and schools cooperated, handing over information to the authorities. Even at this very early stage, one of the key institutions assisting in the persecution of the Rhineland children was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under Eugen Fischer.

Dr Wolfgang Abel, one of the departmental heads at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, carried out a series of ‘racialbiological’ examinations on a small sample of Rhineland children. Abel, who had come to Eugene Fischer’s attention thanks to his work examining Nama and San-Bushmen skeletons in a Viennese collection, concluded that the mixed racial heritage of the Rhineland children had rendered them physically and mentally deformed, and their genetic inferiority was so pronounced that action needed to be taken to ‘prevent their reproduction’. That same year Walther Darre, the Nazi Minister of Agriculture and later one of the architects of German expansion into the USSR, wrote, ‘It is essential to exterminate the leftover from the Black Shame on the Rhine … as a Rhinelander I demand sterilisation of all mulattoes with whom we were saddled.’ Darre suggested that sterilisation take place within two years before the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ became sexually active. ‘Otherwise’, he warned, ‘it is too late, with the result that hundreds of years later this racial deterioration will still be felt.’
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In March 1935, a ‘committee of experts on population and race policy’ was assembled by the Reich Ministry of the Interior, to find a solution to problem of the ‘Rhineland Bastards’.
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One suggestion was that with the help of the church they might be deported to Africa. Yet as Germany no longer possessed any African colonies in which to dump the Rhineland children, it was feared this might lead to some sort of diplomatic incident. Two years later, with the oldest Rhineland children reaching puberty, the Nazi regime consulted Eugen Fischer, whose study of the Rehoboth Basters had been used to legitimise the Nazis’ stance against racial mixing.

In the case of the ‘Rhineland Bastards’, like that of the Gypsies, the Nazi Hereditary Health Courts were bypassed. Instead, Special Commission No. 3 was formed by the Gestapo, who placed both Eugen Fischer and Dr Wolfgang Abel on its board. The commission’s task was to identify and then sterilise the Rhineland children, as efficiently and discreetly as possible. In the spring of 1937, the children were taken directly from their homes or classrooms by the police and subjected to an examination by a board of race scientists. After it had been medically confirmed that they were of mixed race, they were taken to a local hospital where the operation was performed. By 1937 almost four hundred, all in their teens, had been forcibly sterilised. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler had warned that under Nazi rule the Germans would ‘not allow ourselves to be turned into niggers as the French tried to do after 1918’.

Eugen Fischer was the most prominent race scientist with a colonial background promoted to a position of power within the Nazi state, but he was not alone. Although there were some German scientists who had carried out racial and anthropological work in the colonies but later rejected Nazism, most whole heartedly embraced the opportunities offered by the regime. One of the most prominent, at least in the early years of the regime,
was Dr Philalethes Kuhn, a Nazi eugenicist and co-author of the eugenics tract
From German Ancestors to German
Grandchildren
. Kuhn was a former Schutztruppe who had fought against the Nama under Theodor Leutwein. During the Herero genocide he had been the military surgeon at the Karibib concentration camp. After leaving German South-West Africa he continued his research at the Institute of Tropical Disease in Berlin, before joining the
Schutztruppe
in Cameroon. A founding member of Alfred Ploetz’s Society for Racial Hygiene, Kuhn lectured in
Rassenhygiene
at the University of Giessen. He joined the Nazi party in 1923 but died in 1937, before the full scope of the Nazis’ eugenics programmes was realised.

Another scientist who transferred his skills from the Kaiser’s empire to the Nazi regime was Ernst Rodenwaldt. As a colonial doctor Rodenwaldt had served in Togo and, like Fischer, had made his name studying the effects of ‘bastardisation’. Along with Alfred Ploetz, to whom he was linked by marriage, he co-edited the race hygiene journal
The Archives of Race Science and Social Biology
. When the Nazis came to power, Rodenwaldt began to apply his ideas on bastardisation to the subject of Jewish
Mischlinge
, pre-empting certain aspects of the Nuremberg Laws.

The Nazi race scientist Otto Reche first came to prominence as a lecturer at the Hamburg Institute for Colonial Sciences, perhaps the most prestigious of the establishments set up during the Second Reich to advance the study of the colonies and their people. Reche was a physical anthropologist and a close affiliate of both Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lens. He had taken part in the Hamburg South Seas Expedition, a project yielding hundreds of skulls and skeletons that were later used for anthropological research at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. Reche became a committed Nazi and devoted himself to studying the distribution of blood types across the human races in the hope of discovering a means by which Germanic racial ancestry could be proved and racial impurities detected in the blood. Reche also drafted recommendations for settlement and population policy of Eastern Europe for the Race and Settlement Main Office of
the SS. He warned that, like all colonial projects, the settlement of Poland posed a potential danger of ‘bastardisation of German immigrants’. These dangers could only be overcome, Reche prophesied, if the areas in which Germans were to be settled were ethnically cleansed.
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Finally, there was Theodor Mollison, who assisted Eugen Fischer in his work on the Rehoboth Basters and who had undertaken fieldwork in German East Africa. In 1937 Mollison wrote to a colleague, ‘If you think that we scientists do not join in the call “Heil Hitler”, you are very much mistaken. We, the German scientists, are very much aware of what we owe to Adolf Hitler.’
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The Nazi state transformed the place of race scientists and eugenicists in German society. They were entrusted with nothing less than the genetic health and racial purity of the German people, and with transmitting their ideas and prejudices to their students. As lecturers, research supervisors, mentors and teachers, they trained the eugenicists and anthropologists of the Third Reich. It was this generation, young and enthusiastic for the racial revolution, who left the laboratories, institutes and colonial schools and went out into the field and to the new territories of the East after 1941 and applied the lessons they had learned from men like Fischer, Reche and Mollison.

The connections between the colonial race scientists and the stars of Nazi race science are startling. Joseph Mengele was a student of Theodor Mollison at the University of Munich. After completing his Ph. D. on the racial anatomical differences in the structure of the human jaw, Mengele was drawn into the orbit of Otmar von Verschuer, professor at Frankfurt University’s Third Reich Institute of Hereditary Biology and Race Hygiene. Von Verschuer was a close associate of Eugen Fischer, and, on Eugen Fischer’s retirement, in 1942 became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. When Mengele was wounded on the Eastern Front that same year, von Verschuer
invited him to come and work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which had by then been renamed the Eugen Fischer Institute. A year later, Mengele left Berlin to take up a post as Senior Doctor at Auschwitz.

In 1943 von Verschuer helped his protégé attain funds for his work, writing in support of a grant application made to the German Research Council. The money awarded for Mengele’s work paid for a new and well-equipped pathology lab at Auschwitz in which Mengele conducted a series of horrific experiments.

The extent of Mengele’s involvement with von Verschuer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute will never be fully known, as much of the institute’s documentation was burned by von Verschuer in 1945 as the Russians closed in on the city. However, what is known is that in the darkest traditions of racial experimentation Mengele sent body parts and skeletons of his victims at Auschwitz back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. On one occasion a family of eight were killed by Mengele so their eyes, which displayed a rare discolouring, could be sent for examination by scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
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For the second time in German history, the victims of a racial genocide were used to advance the racial theories that had justified their killing.

In the name of their racial and eugenic revolutions, the Nazi state turned upon its own citizens: Jews, Gypsies, black people and the disabled. The struggle to secure
Lebensraum
beyond the borders of the Reich would not be fought against such a weak opposition; it required the mobilisation of the entire nation. Alongside the process of rearmament, the Nazis embarked upon a concerted propaganda campaign that aimed to exploit the deep sense of nostalgia that millions of Germans felt for the lost colonies in Africa.

By the 1930s, the idea of the lost colonies was perhaps a more potent and mobilising force than colonialism itself had been during the Second Reich. The story of the former colonies had
become a powerful narrative of fortitude, loss and injustice. The importance of this colonial longing for the political parties of the right and centre cannot be overstated. Germany had lost her empire under the terms of the hated Treaty of Versailles. It was therefore politically impossible for any party – other than those of the far left – openly to accept their loss. To do so risked being linked with the ‘November Criminals’, the civilian politicians who had supposedly stabbed the army in the back in 1918 and betrayed the nation at the negotiating table a year later.