Anthropometer used to measure length of body parts in Nazi Germany

Dr. Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) was born to a Catholic family in Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied medicine and natural sciences at Freiburg University, and later became a professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg. Dr. Fischer published numerous works on his own, and with Dr. Erwin Baur and Dr. Fritz Lenz, all of whom were considered leaders in the German eugenics movement. Many themes and ideas from their works were incorporated into Nazi attitudes of racial superiority. Anthropology and the sub-discipline Anthropometry, the systematic identification and classification of a range of physical characteristics found within different populations of people, were both well-suited to the rising emphasis on eugenics, often referred to as racial hygiene, in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Many supporters linked eugenics to race, and believed that “race mixing,” modern medicine, keeping the “unfit” alive to reproduce, and costly welfare programs hindered natural selection and would lead to the biological “degeneration” of society. These ideas and practices began to inform government policy, and were absorbed into the ideology and platform of the newly formed Nazi Party during the 1920s.

In 1927, Dr. Fischer became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. From 1934 to 1935, he taught a course on anthropology, genetics, and eugenics, also called racial hygiene, for Schutzstaffel (SS) doctors. Many of Dr. Fischer’s theories about eugenics and miscegenation formed the supposedly scientific basis of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. They were also utilized as the justification for Aktion T-4, the Nazi euthanasia program for the “incurably sick.” While at the Institute, he ordered sterilizations and other eugenic procedures, and evaluated medical experiments carried out in euthanasia killing centers and concentration camps.

In 1940, Dr. Fischer became an official member of the Nazi party. Later, he sent an assistant to the newly established Łódź ghetto to photograph the Jewish residents for a book he was planning to publish about his antisemitic beliefs. In 1942, he left the Institute and received a grant to study the effects of heredity versus environment on twins. Dr. Fischer appointed his protégé, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, to lead the study. Von Verschuer passed the project on to a former graduate student, Dr. Josef Mengele. In May 1943, Dr. Mengele was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in German-occupied Poland, in order to perform experiments on Jewish and Roma twins and dwarves imprisoned there.

After the war ended in May 1945, Dr. Fischer went through what the Allied powers called denazification: the effort to remove all traces of Nazi ideology, institutions, influence, and laws from Germany, as well as Nazi party members from offices or positions of responsibility. He was not prosecuted as a war criminal. The Nuremburg Doctors’ Trial (1946) presented some doctors, especially those at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, as having been manipulated by the SS and other Nazis, and were not affiliated with the concentration camps or killing centers. Instead, the SS and medical personnel, such as Dr. Mengele, who were directly involved with the camps and centers, were identified as those most responsible for the atrocities. Dr. Fischer returned to Freiburg University, and in1952, he was appointed honorary president of the German Anthropological Society.