In Search of "Aryan Blood": Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany

VI. Blood as Metaphor and science in the Nuremberg Race Laws

149 Jews and Seroanthropology Hitler’s eugenic and racial beliefs attracted right-wing political and medical ideologues long before his appointment as chancellor in 1933. In 1930 German race theorist Fritz Lenz lauded him as the first politician “of truly great import, who has taken racial hygiene as a serious element of state policy.”517 The National Socialist Worker’s Party was arguably the first political party in which racial hygiene was a central part of the political platform. When they did seize power, the Nazis immediately began to apply these ideas by separating “real” Germans from those categorized as “non-German.” Because of the Nazi conviction that race was a biological category, the cooperation and support of physicians was deemed essential . To ensure this, Gleichschaltung forced all medical institutions, propaganda programs, and policies to serve the aims of Nazi selectionist racial ideology.518 The Nazis’ objective had consistently been to apply their principles under the pretense of legal, bureaucratic, orderly measures; with the guidance of doctors and lawyers, eventually all “racially other” individuals would be stripped of their civil rights. The segregation of Germany’s predominantly assimilated Jewish minority was dictated by the Nuremberg race laws introduced in 1935. The legislation gave complicated guidelines, which replaced any previous state directives, for the classification of Jews. The Nuremberg legislation depended on differences in “blood.” Racial categorization hinged not on whether one was “Nordic” or “Aryan” but on 517 Quoted in Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 61. 518 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 490. C H A P T E R V I BLOOD as metAPHor and science in the nuremberg race laws med_04___ok.indd 149 2011-12-18 20:21:21 150 CHAPTER VI whether one had “German blood.” This terminology meant that the metaphorical notion of blood had to be quantified; how much “non-German blood” did an individual have to have in order to be considered Jewish? Or, conversely, how much “German blood” did a Jew need in order to “pass” as German? Imprecise categories of blood difference, whether portrayed in a sexual or scientific context, were used not only to construct racial categories , but also to interpret infractions of the legislation that resulted in a charge of blood defilement. Such references had been common in National Socialist discourse from the start. When the party issued its official twentyfive -point program in February 1920, Point Four stated that only those of “German blood” were considered Volksgenossen (German nationals), and only Volksgenossen could be German citizens. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written while he was briefly imprisoned during the early Weimar Republic, is replete with blood-based metaphors. Using this same blood rhetoric in legal categorization during the Third Reich would reveal the tensions of basing legislation in what were usually propagandistic ideals. A close analysis of the 1935 Nuremberg “Blood Protection Law” and its application will demonstrate the disconnect between medical and political notions of differences in blood. This disparity became increasingly pronounced during the prewar years of the “racial state” of the Third Reich.519 Seroanthropology in 1933 Even a cursory overview of seroanthropology in the early 1930s would have shown that it was ineffective as a tool of racial classification. Studies repeatedly demonstrated that no one blood type could be definitively linked to oneracialtype;patternscouldonlybebroadlyobservedthroughdifferences in group blood type frequencies. The general public, however, was largely unaware of such technicalities, as seroanthropology, a new, very specialized science, had received little attention. This lack of awareness, combined with ongoing loose references to “blood differences” in the much more race-conscious environment of the day, led to frequent uncertainties and misconceptions. In a 1933 article entitled “What Blood Tells,” American 519 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). med_04___ok.indd 150 2011-12-18 20:21:21 151 Seroanthropology in 1933 physician M.H. Jacobs responded to the common query as to whether a sample of human blood “could tell the race of the person from which it came.” In most individual cases this was not possible, he explained, though some information could occasionally be obtained. We can, for example, in many cases say with a high degree of probability that a given sample of blood could not have come from a pure-blooded American Indian. It happens that in this race three of the four well-known blood groups, for which tests are made before blood transfusions, seem...