German scientists took their science, which became known as “racial hygiene,” very seriously. As noted, prior to 1933, German scientists published thirteen Scientific journals devoted primarily to racial hygiene and related fields, and also established over thirty institutions, many of which were connected with major universities or research centres devoted to “racial science.”52 During the Nazi era, close to 150 scientific journals, many of which still are highly respected today, covered racial hygiene and allied fields.53 Enormous data files were kept on the races, many of which were analyzed and used for research papers published in various German and other scientific journals. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was established in 1927 and is still active today under a new name-minus the word eugenics.
The various eugenic institutes also researched the “persistence” of various “primitive racial traits” in certain races in and outside of Germany. Eugenicists soon found much evidence for the “Cro-magnon racial type in certain races, and presumably also [for the] Neanderthal” type, even though they had a larger brain on the average than modern man.54 Like their American and British counterparts, the researchers at various German racial hygiene institutes and universities discovered genetic evidence for virtually every human trait from criminality to hernias, including even divorce and “loving to sail on water.” The scientists saw their work as a noble effort to continue “Darwin’s attempts to elucidate the origin of species.
World History
