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

Conclusion

225 Surveying “Native Germans” While scientific studies of blood and race were not utilized by the Nazis in enforcing the identification and separation of different racial types, blood rhetoric remained politically useful. German race ideologues were able to exploit the flexible notion of blood defilement, which could function in either a clinical or sexual context. As advancements were made in blood science, these were incorporated into racial propaganda because science was felt to project an “objective and value free” image.824 The competing political ideologies of the interwar period were evident in studies of blood, which were related to widely disparate areas of concern. During the Weimar Republic, a paradigm was established whereby people were divided into those possessing “value” and those lacking it.825 Through analyses of groups “lacking in value,” such as criminals, asylum inmates, and diseased persons, researchers attempted to apply blood science to the “falling birthrate, corruption , and various forms of degeneration” of the time.826 Infectious disease and mental instability were traits perceived as disadvantageous to the Volkskörper’s well-being. Researchers hoped that blood science might assist in distinguishing and protecting the purity of German blood. In spite of the intriguing patterns occasionally observed, comparisons between blood type and other characteristics lacked precision. For purposes of racial classification , seroanthropology appeared to have the same disadvantage as physical anthropology in that no one feature could be used to determine 824 Efron, Defenders of the Race, 2. 825 Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution,’” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, Reevaluating the Third Reich (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 277. 826 Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 305. C H A P T E R V I I I conclusion med_04___ok.indd 225 2011-12-18 20:22:01 226 Conclusion race. Examiners who were convinced that there were different racial types, and that each had its place in a racial hierarchy, made a much more concerted effort than their unbiased colleagues to determine the racial significance of blood. Even with its best efforts, however, the German Institute for Blood Group Research failed to achieve its main objective of proving a relationship between blood and race. Statistics that initially held promise were gradually chipped away at; repeated research confirmed that there was no link between blood type and race, physiognomy, mental disorders, or illness. The fledgling science of seroanthropology was doomed by the fact that there was no association between blood and race. Any connections that had been made crumbled under close medical scrutiny. Seroanthropologists became increasingly pessimistic as inconsistencies and contradictions grew ever more conspicuous. For völkisch scientists, arguably the most committed of the lot, their patience wore thinner as not only unpredictable, but unwanted results turned up. There were statistics to suggest that extensive miscegenation had occurred between “Aryan and non-Aryan types,” resulting in Mischlinge with “mongrel blood.” This especially seemed to be the case in eastern Germany, where levels of “Western” type A blood were generally much lower. Disparities in distributions of blood type within Germany contradicted National Socialist claims of “pure blooded” Germans. The medical evidence, the typing of the blood of thousands of Germans, had literally proved this wrong. What is interesting is that seroanthropology was much more likely to be rejected by race scientists during the Third Reich— even though other methods of racial classification were similarly problematic . Both Nazi “racial experts” and bureaucrats tended to prefer using traditional physiognomic racial indicators, even as they occasionally criticized this approach. Anthropomorphic characteristics, particularly the shape of the skull, had been the prevailing means of racial differentiation long before the Nazis. In the late nineteenth century, German anthropologists arranged for the collection of murdered natives’ skulls from German Southwest Africa for racial research. Later, Weimar scientists hosted the “Best Nordic Head” contest. Both serve as good examples of a preference that spanned many decades and was carried into Nazism. Immediately after Kristallnacht, university and museum anthropologists rushed to a stadium where Jews had been rounded up and interned, to make plaster-cast masks med_04___ok.indd 226 2011-12-18 20:22:01 227 Conclusion of hundreds of prisoners.827 Haste was necessary, for these prisoners were being deported to Buchenwald, and many would not return.828 National Socialists were merely being consistent in what was by then a very familiar emphasis on appearance. Mere observation of the different “shapes and colors ” of the races was certainly easier to...