The year my father was imprisoned, in 1933, Hitler appointed his favourite racial scientist, Dr Eugen Fischer, as rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University). Fischer was already the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin, and one of the signatories of the “Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State”.
By the late 1930s, with Hitler’s unequivocal support, Fischer became one of the most influential scientists in the Nazis’ implementation of eugenics programmes, which included the forced sterilisation and euthanising of mentally and physically disabled people. The discrimination against and murder of the Reich’s Jews, which included my family, was underpinned by the science of anthropology, and by eugenics in particular.
The sciences of anthropology and eugenics colluded with biologically inflected state programmes that claimed to improve the health and welfare of national populations but, in the process, sent those deemed unworthy of belonging to a race or population to their deaths.
In the words of political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, “For the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorise a holocaust.”
This is the tragic story of the complicity of Western Enlightenment thinking in the genocidal violence of the last century. A significant strand of this story, somewhat surprisingly, begins, not in the heart of metropolitan Europe, but in a remote section of the colonial periphery of southern Africa.
During my 2012 visit to Williston, northern Cape, in search of Eugen Robinski’s legacy to the town, I stumbled on the footprint of the other Eugen. Like so many of my discoveries on this journey into the past, this encounter had an uncanny quality to it.
Basters
It was on this visit that I learnt about how the mixed-race Basters, despite living under the protection of the Rhenish missionaries at Amandelboom, were dispossessed of their land in the 1860s by trekboer pastoralists and white commercial wool farmers. Losing access to their grazing lands, many had to move northwards, eventually settling in Rehoboth in South West Africa, in 1870.
In 1884, South West Africa became a colony of the German Empire, and the Rehoboth Basters were treated thereafter as an intermediary class of colonial subjects, sandwiched between the indigenous population and white German-speaking colonisers.
In 1904, after an escalation of conflict between the indigenous population and German colonial authorities, the Herero rebellion erupted and was brutally suppressed, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 24 000 to 100 000 Herero between 1904 and 1907, and 10 000 Nama.
In a letter written in 1904, the German General Lothar von Trotha outlined his strategy for dealing with this rebellion: “I believe that the (Herero) nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this is not possible by tactical measures, (they) have to be expelled from the country… This will be possible if the waterholes from Grootfontein to Gobabis are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of the nation who have moved backwards and destroy them gradually.”
Von Trotha eventually defeated the Herero at the Battle of Waterberg in August of that year, driving them into the Omaheke Desert, where most of them died of thirst and hunger.
The survivors of this massacre, the majority of whom were women and children, were herded to detention centres such as the notorious Shark Island concentration camp off Lüderitz, where they worked as slave labourers for the German military and settlers.
Prisoners were categorised into groups designating their suitability for work, and issued death certificates even before they died, indicating their “death by exhaustion following privation”.
Many interned Herero died of disease, overwork or malnutrition, with estimates of the mortality rate varying between 45 and 74%.
It took over a century, until July last year, for the German government to acknowledge that Von Trotha’s actions were “part of a race war” that culminated in the first genocide of the twentieth century – a trial run for a genocide that would occur two decades later in Europe.
German colonial rule continued in South West Africa until 1915, when it was invaded by South African forces during World War I. When the war ended in 1918, South Africa took over administration of the territory, a situation that continued until Namibia achieved independence in 1990.
By the time Fischer arrived in Rehoboth in 1908, the colony had already assimilated popular eugenics ideas that racially mixed peoples were politically unreliable, potentially dangerous, and subject to cultural degeneration and biological decay.
Although the Rehoboth Basters continued to be loyal and useful allies to German officials, the possibility of a Baster rebellion remained a worry.
In 1913, Fischer’s ethnography, The Bastards of Rehoboth and the Problem of Miscegenation in Man, was published to widespread acclaim.
Its appendix provides practical recommendations for German colonial policy, including the use of Basters as low-level officials, foremen and native police to reinforce German colonial rule.
Fischer also recommends that the ban on mixed marriages and racial miscegenation in the German colonies be upheld, which would later influence Nazi laws to promote “the protection of German blood and honour” through the Nazi Marriage Act of 1935 and what became the Nuremberg Laws. These laws forced my father to hide his relationships with his gentile girlfriends in Erfurt.
Fischer’s study in Rehoboth was also deployed by National Socialists to support the idea that the recessive genes of racially mixed populations led to physiological, psychological and intellectual degeneration.
By the late 1930s, Fischer was one of Germany’s most influential scientists, with his institute in Berlin laying the foundations for Nazi eugenics that would find their ultimate expression in the Final Solution.
In a public address on July 29, 1933, Fischer offered his position on the Jewish question. Titled The Concept of the Volkish State, Considered Biologically, the lecture laid out the following viewpoint: That there are physical and intellectual differences no one can objectively deny. I am not pronouncing a value judgement when I declare this. I even go so far as to say that a nation mixed and crossed equally of Aryan and Jewish components could theoretically create a very credible culture, but it would never be the same as one that grew on purely German national soil; it would not be a German culture, but an entirely different, half-Oriental one.
Fischer’s position on Jews as a foreign body in the German Volk allowed him to promote his institute as Germany’s foremost architect of racial-classification policies, including the notorious “genetic and race science certificates of descent”.
Fischer was also appointed a judge for Berlin’s Appellate Genetic Health Court, thereby helping to implement the Sterilisation Law of 1933 to combat hereditary medical conditions.
Fischer’s story provides sobering lessons for science, and for my own discipline of anthropology. He was an ambitious man who believed that scientific expertise ought to determine state policies, but he had struggled to influence policy during the Weimar Republic period, because of the accountability structures of liberal democracy.
Policy
To influence policy one had to lobby and pressure parliamentarians, which was a slow and laborious process. The Nazis’ rise to power presented him with unprecedented opportunities to short-circuit all of this.
In no time he had a direct line to the most powerful state officials. As director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Fischer and his colleagues offered to provide the Nazis with scientific expertise to guide their eugenics policies.
In return, Fischer attained unprecedented access to state resources for research. Medical scientists and doctors became virtual gods during the Third Reich. Their expertise was seen to hold the key to the modern eugenicist state so desired by the Nazis.
There are striking similarities in the ways officials and scientists such as Fischer classified European Jews and the Rehoboth Basters.
The Basters’ unstable, in-between status led German colonial officials to vacillate between viewing them as loyal subjects and potentially dangerous troublemakers.
Jews in Europe occupied a similar position and were often seen as constituting a political threat to the nation, either as communists, or rootless cosmopolitans and unpatriotic capitalists. Their dual loyalties meant they could never be trusted. Like the Basters, Jews had also tried to subvert doubts about their patriotism by fighting the wars of their political masters.
My grandfather, David Robinski, fought for the Germans in World War I only to become disillusioned with the Kaiser and his military exploits. The payback for his loyalty to Germany was the removal of his citizenship and his execution in the forests of Riga.
Through Fischer’s work, a barbaric and lethal science incubated in the colonial laboratories of southern Africa had boomeranged back into the heartland of “civilised Europe”.
l This is an extract from Letters of Stone by Steven Robins published by Penguin.
l Robins is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the politics of land and identity, and social movements and popular politics in South Africa. Apart from his academic writings, he is a regular newspaper op-ed contributor on issues of public concern.