Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer

Otmar von Verschuer (rear) supervises the measurement of two men's head circumference as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (16 July 1896, Wildeck, Hesse-Nassau – 8 August 1969) was a German human biologist and eugenicist concerned primarily with "racial hygiene" and twin research.^[1][2][3] He became Secretary, German Society for Race Hygiene (Tübingen) in 1924, and worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A or KWIfA) in Dahlem(Berlin), from its founding in 1927 until its dissolution in 1945: first as director of the Department of Human Genetics, then as director of the Division on Twin Research, finally succeeding Eugen Fischer as Director of the KWI-A in 1942.^[4]

He was also associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene (Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene), as described below (see "Sterilization").

Verschuer did not formally join the Nazi party until 1940^[5], but he participated in activities that strongly advanced the Nazi agenda to protect Nordic peoples (‘Aryans’) from ‘contamination’ by ‘inferior races’, then, at the close of the war and beyond, hid or destroyed the record of those activities and other activities carried on by KWI-A personnel.

Two of Verschuer's most well-known assistants were Karin Magnussen and Josef Mengele. Karin Magnussen studied eyes from living twins at Auschwitz harvested for her by Mengele at Auschwitz. Mengele was a SS physician at the Auschwitz death camp who later became known as the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz.^[6]

Sterilization

Verschuer argued in principle for the eugenic sterilization of the "feeble-minded, schizophrenics, the manic depressive, epileptics, psychopaths, chorea sufferers, the congenitally blind and deaf-mute, whereby he qualified his statement by referring to the uncertain prognosis of heredity in such cases as manic-depressive insanity, epilepsy, and deaf-mutism."^[7] He expressed the opinion that this issue had a moral, theological aspect. Eugenic sterilization (which Verschuer equated with medical curative treatment) was "no 'unauthorized intervention into the natural process of creation;' the willingness to make oneself sterile is rather a command of Christian charity. The fulcrum and hub of the argumentation comprised the concept of 'sacrifice':

"'It is demanded of us Christians, who follow the example of our master, that we be willing to sacrifice our lives in the service of Christian charity. Christian charity extends to children who will be born. We are therefore obligated to extend the circle of humans to those who are not yet born, and I believe it is justified to demand from people a lesser sacrifice than the sacrifice of life, namely to forego having children, for the love of children that are expected to be diseased, so that from the perspective of Christian charity sterilization must be regarded as justified." ^[8]

According to sections 263 and 264 of the 1927 General German Penal Code, "... sterilizations with a medical indication would remain exempt from punishment... in accordance with section 263 (as the practice of a conscientious doctor), or in accordance with section 264 (as not contra bona mores),...". ^[9]

Reasons for sterilization included the "high probability that the offspring would suffer from serious physical or mental genetic defects", such as:

• congenital feeble-mindedness
• schizophrenia
• manic-depressive insanity
• hereditary epilepsy
• hereditary St. Vitus's dance (Huntington's Chorea)
• hereditary blindness
• hereditary deafness
• "serious hereditary physical deformities"
• "serious alcoholism"^[10]

These attitudes toward sterilization were unsurprising, as eugenics is about racial 'hygiene': the purification process whereby 'genetically defective' people (because of race, mental illness, epilepsy, criminality) are removed from the volk ("people", or nation).

Most cities in Germany developed plans to carry out the new sterilization law. Frankfurt am Main set up an Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at Frankfurt University, and asked Verschuer to become its director. Verschuer took the post in 1935, while also remaining associated with the KWI-A.

"[Verschuer] was enthusiastic about the new law and its results.

"'We know today that the life of a Volk is only guaranteed when the racial uniqueness and hereditary health of the gene pool ... is maintained. The nub of the population policy in the Third Reich is therefore: hereditary and racial care or hygiene. ... "'The National Socialistic State with exceptional energy has assumed [the responsibility] for the practical administration of hereditary and racial care. The first goal was the fight against racial alienation through the Jews. The second deed is the damming up [i.e., sterilization] of those with hereditary illnesses through the Law for Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny. In the two years since [this law] has been in place, approximately 100,000 sterilizations have been carried out.'"

"Verschuer, being an enthusiastic Nazi and well positioned in the apparatus, consolidated all the tasks of the new law under his control."^[11]

"Positive" eugenics

Verschuer opposed euthanasia to some degree. He also opposed the idea of breeding supermen.^[12] However, he was a supporter of "positive" eugenics: incentives to favor the propagation of Aryans. In 1933 he wrote an article in August/September issue of the newsletter Soziale Arbeitsgemeinschaft evangelischer Männer und Frauen Thüringens, which emphasized education and training, tax legislation, control of immigration and emigration, genetic biological stock-taking and marriage counseling for prospective parents, but also indirectly demanded bars to marriage for "those of alien ancestry," "ill and deformed persons and the genetically ill from encumbered families." He mentioned sterilization, but "only in passing."^[13]

Miscegenation

Verschuer felt that that when a superior race mixes with an inferior race (mulattos), it always brings the superior race down. He noted two exceptions to this, however: Booker T. Washington and Alexander Pushkin:

"The crossing of intellectually very capable races with intellectually less capable ones, e.g. Europeans with Negroes, yields a product that is between these races intellectually [...] Occasionally, an individual half-breed of this kind can also be strikingly intellectually capable (Pushkin, Washington), as is to be expected from the laws of heredity. The assumption that half-breeds are always worse than both parents intellectually -- or even morally -- is incorrect."^[14]

Twin research and medical atrocities

Twin research was important because it established a connection between race with eugenics and studies of twins. Nazi twin study was in fact a somewhat unscientific way of studying genetics, in a way that could be easily be manipulated to manufacture tailor-made results. Once Fischer retired from the KWI-A, Verschuer became the new Director, continuing twin study (with subordinates Siegfried Liebau and Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, and Karin Magnussen at Dahlem) from a somewhat different perspective that may have been more than a renaming: phenogenetics. Phenogenetics included environmental relationships both before and after birth.

Verschuer received Heinrich Himmler's permission to work in Auschwitz from 1944 on. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele's assistance in supplying the KWIfA with some "scientific materials" from Auschwitz:

"My assistant, Dr. Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis."

Verschuer also noted in the report that the war conditions had made it difficult for the KWI-A to procure "twin materials" for study, and that Mengele's unique position at Auschwitz offered a special opportunity in this respect. (In the summer of 1944, Mengele and his Jewish slave assistant Dr. Miklos Nyiszli sent other "scientific materials" to the KWI-A, including the bodies of murdered Gypsies, internal organs of dead children, skeletons of two murdered Jews, and blood samples of twins infected by Mengele with typhus.)

Genocide of Jews and Gypsies

"In his talk about the "Race Biology of the Jews" Verschuer contradicted the generally accepted idea that Jews could be recognized by the shape of their nose or their blood group. Instead he referred to the emerging science of comparative race pathology . A number of illnesses and disorders occurred more frequently in Jews than among the non-Jewish population: diabetes, neuroses, flat feet, myonomes, xeroderma pegmentosum, hemophilia, and deaf-mutedness. 'Amarotic idiocy' (Tay-Sach-s syndrome) and torsion dystonia are particularly prevalent among the Eastern European Jews. To explain this phenomenon Verschuer advanced population-genetic argumentation: Through conscious segregation from their "host volk" the Jews had '"bred" their race themselves' in genetic isolation." "... he described attributes that were supposedly typical for the Jewish population, including dispositions for and resistance against certain illnesses, emphasized the 'Jew's need for doctors and fear of illness' and even referred to allegedly specific forms of criminality: '[...] the Jews showed a reduced rate of crime for assault and theft, but penalties were considerably above average for defamation, fraud and forgery [...].' As an explanation, Verschuer, picking up on Fischer, alleged 'that the typical characteristics for today's Jew are mainly derived from the Near Eastern-Oriental basic stock,' which had 'experienced a certain loosening up' through miscegnation." -- ^[15]

"... Fischer and Verschuer ... were guests of honor to a working congress at the inauguration of the 'Frankfurt Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question' ... on March 27/28, 1941. The aspired goal of the 'total solution' to the 'Jewish qustion,' as was bluntly stated here, was the Volkstod ('death of the nation'). The economist Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902-1979) pointed out for consideration that the deportation for forced labor in camps in Poland or an overseas colony could also have the consequence of 'social pauperization and upheaval,' but 'by no means the physical self-disintegration of Jewry, for the death of a nation is never a fast death.' ...^[16]

Erasing the KWI-A record (1945)

As the war was drawing to a close in 1945, Verschuer moved the files of the KWI-A from Dahlem to his own home, hoping for a more favorable response from the advancing Allied armies than from the advancing Soviet Army.

"On February 3, 1945, a directive was issued by ... Albert Speer... to the operations staff of the KWG, instructing that the institutes under its control be relocated from endangered areas. Ernst Telschow forwarded this directive to the KWI-A, where it arrived on February 5 ... Had it been ... Verschuer's express goal to hold out in Dahlem as long as possible and await the further course of events ... by February 1945 it must have been clear to him that the fall of Berlin was merely a matter of time. Relocating the institute appeared imperative, and in secret Verschuer already had begun the preparations for a move. (Verschuer to Lenz, 9/2/1945, MPG Archive, Dept. III, rep. 86 B, No. 12.) So Speer's directive came at just the right time ... "

Later, however, Telschow "informed Verschuer orally that Speer 'in retrospect [had] not desired' the 'application of the relocation of the KWI-A directive' to the KWI-A. ... Thus it can be presumed that Verschuer was quite aware that he had received a green light to relocate his institute neither from the General Administration nor from the Armaments Ministry. However, when Engelhardt Bühler ... managed to organize a trailer truck around February 9, 1945 -- to everyone's surprise, Verschuer acted without delay, supported by Speer's written command to relocate, abruptly overrode the oral counter-command communicated by Telschow and set the relocation in motion. On February 12, 1945, when part of the material sent to Beetz had already been loaded on the truck, he sent a circular to the department heads Abel, Diehl, Gottschaldt, Lenz, and Nachtsheim, officially informing them that the majority of the institute's inventory was to be relocated to his family estate in Solz near Bebra."

"Verschuer confirmed that some of the material involved was 'secret files, which by no means may fall into enemy hands,' asked Nachtsheim to attend to the matter and to give the caretaker the order to burn the material 'in good time'.

"On February 17, 1945 Verschuer laconically informed the General Administration that the relocation of the institute to Solz had been completed 'without significant inconvenience.'"

"In the end, the KWI-A was left with two rooms of the Haus am See, in which institute property -- 'numerous scientific apparatus, including special fabrications [...] valuable optics, microtome, projection equipment, part of the scientific library, the twin archive and additional scientific materials' -- were stored. Karl Diehl managed to rescue some of these materials in September 1945 when the building was requisitioned for good by the Soviet military authorities."^[17]

"Interestingly enough, the correspondence between Verschuer and Fischer is missing from the archives for the period in which they continued to correspond about their presentation of 'facts' to the denazification offices. ... "^[18] Indeed, even now it is difficult or impossible to access records during this period. See Research Materials: Max Planck Society Archive.

How did Otmar Verschuer avoid prosecution as a war criminal?

Verschuer was never tried for war crimes despite many indications that he not only was fully cognisant of Mengele's work at Auschwitz, but even encouraged and collaborated with Mengele in some of his most grisly research. However solid evidence of Verschuer's willing collaboration could not be established, much to the disappointment of the principal post-war Allied investigator, Leo Alexander, assigned to his case. In a letter to his wife from 1946, Alexander wrote:

It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true. Some new evidence has come in where two doctors in Berlin, one a man and the other a woman, collected eyes of different colour. It seems that the concentration camps were combed for people whose one eye had a slightly different color than the other. Who ever [sic] was unlucky enough to possess such a pair of slightly unequal eyes had them cut out and was killed, the eyes being sent to Berlin. This is the carrying out into reality of an old gruesome German fairy tale which is included in the Tales of Hoffmann, where Dr Coppelius posing as a sandman comes at night and cuts out children's eyes when they are tired. The grim part of the story is that Doctors von Verschuer and Magnussen in Berlin did prefer children and particularly twins. There is no end to this nightmare, at least 23 are being tried now and, I trust, the others will follow later.

Alexander initiated investigations into the location of the incriminating collection but could not locate it—it had been sent to an unknown destination in Berlin and from there vanished out of sight; Alexander ruefully concluded that Verschuer had destroyed it.

Later investigators had difficulty getting hard evidence of the gruesome role they felt Verschuer played in the Holocaust.

Otto Hahn set up a commission at the KWG to investigate charges against Verschuer. Under the leadership of a judge, Kurt von Lewinski of the KWG's Institute of Law, four members of the KWG (Otto Warburg, Robert Havemann, Kurt Gottschaldt, and Hans Nachtsheim) contemplated both questions of specific guilt and the scientific value of Verschuer's work itself. "Their decision was severe: Not only was Verschuer's link to Auschwitz established but he was judged to be a 'racist fanatic.' Thus ended Verschuer's career at the KWIA." ^[19]

"On 7 November 1946 Wolfson [U.S. Counsel for War Crimes] drew on evidence provided by the psychologist Kurt Gottschaldt that Verschuer had been ‘informed of the detailed setup as it existed in Auschwitz.’ Not unreasonably, Wolfson recommended that [Karin] Magnussen, a known Nazi activist, be arrested and interrogated. Verschuer counter-attacked that the denunciations derived from communists. [...] Wolfson persisted in his accusations by placing Mengele at the head of a table of Auschwitz officers in 12 February 1947. Attempts were made to have the de-Nazification verdict revoked, resulting in a third interrogation of Verschuer on 13 May 1947, when Verschuer told of Mengele’s excellent relations with his patients in Auschwitz. ... Verschuer counter-attacked that Havemann’s evidence against him was provided by the communist sympathizer, Kurt Gottschaldt. ...

"Verschuer consistently pressed home the point that those discrediting him were 'communist agents.'"^[20]

Ultimately Verschuer was judged to be a Nazi fellow traveler (Mitläufer) - a relatively mild categorization -- fined 600 Reichmark, and released from custody. "He was free to continue his career, even if it would not be in Berlin." ^[21]

"Publicizing German medical atrocities could undermine wholesale public confidence in clinical science." To avoid the appearance that the entire medical community could no longer be trusted, the Nuremberg Medical Trial political appointees "... presented medical researchers as having been 'perverted' by the manipulative control of the SS and as poisoned by Nazism..." and instead that "the human experiments were so ill-conceived as not to be worthy of the status of science..."^[22]

"[T]he authorities considered that further investigation of hospitals and universities was undesirable, ... [because] if understaken on a large scale it might result in necessary removal from German medicine of large number of highly qualified men at a time when their services are most needed." ^[23]

"On 19 September 1949 Heubner, and the KWG scientists Adolf Butenandt, Max Hartmann, and Boris Rajewsky cleared Verschuer. This Dahlem commission marked the reverse of the NMT, as it was a tribunal of peers (mostly tarnished by various degrees of complicity under National Socialism). The commission could easily reject that Verschuer was a racial fanatic, or that he collaborated with the SS -- for science under National Socialism did not necessarily work this way. It played down the significance of the Mengele link by stressing that he was only a camp doctor, who would have followed SS regulations against spreading information about Auschwitz as an extermination camp." ^[24]

Thus, the ties of the German medical community -- especially those at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes -- were not in any way associated with the death camps; therefore, medical science and the scientists should really be acceptable to the German public and the rest of the world. The SS, and medical personnel such as Mengele who were directly involved with the death camps, were fingered as the most responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.^[25]

Later life

In late 1945 or early 1946 Verschuer petitioned the mayor of Frankfurt to allow him to reestablish the KWI-A. However the commission in charge of rebuilding the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft decreed that "Verschuer should be considered not as a collaborator, but one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich." The KWI-A was not reestablished.

In 1951, Verschuer was awarded the prestigious professorship of human genetics at the University of Münster, where he established one of the largest centers of genetics research in West Germany. Like many "racial hygienists" of the Nazi period, and many American eugenicists, Verschuer was successful in redefining himself as a genetics researcher after the war, aided by the German public's desire to dissociate itself from the war's atrocities.

Verschuer had been accepted during the war as a member of the American Eugenics Society, a position he kept until his death.

When Verschuer died in 1969 (in an automobile accident), obituaries in German scientific journals made no mention of his Nazi involvement.

Note

Regarding personal names: Freiherr is a title, translated as Baron, not a first or middle name. The female forms are Freifrau and Freiin.

Footnotes

1. ^ Twin research has been used as a substitute for genetic research and, as such, has been associated with a great deal of scientific fraud; see The "Burt Affair".
2. ^ Nicholas Wade, "IQ and Heredity: Suspicion of Fraud Beclouds Classic Experiment", Science 26 November 1976: 916-919.
3. ^ D. D. Dorfman, "The Cyril Burt Question: New Findings", Science 29 September 1978: Vol. 201 no. 4362 pp. 1177-1186
4. ^ Gretchen E. Schafft, "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich", U. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2004, p. 54
5. ^ Simone Gigliotti, Berel Lang, "The Holocaust: a reader", Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, p. 104
6. ^ A display of von Verschauer in relation to Mengele appeared during 2011 in the exhibit "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" in the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.Kerns, William (2011-02-21). "Deadly medicine [photo of von Verschuer appears in the print edition only"]. Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: pp. B1, B4. http://lubbockonline.com/entertainment/2011-02-21/large-holocaust-exhibit-visits-texas-tech-museum. Retrieved 2011-02-25. 
7. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 97
8. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, pp. 97, 98
9. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 100
10. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, pp. 216-217
11. ^ Gretchen E. Schafft, "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich", U. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2004, p. 154
12. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 311
13. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 220, note #441
14. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 120
15. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, pp. 237, 239
16. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, p. 342
17. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 259, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, pp. 403, 406, 406
18. ^ Gretchen E. Schafft, "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich", U. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2004, p. 189
19. ^ Gretchen E. Schafft, "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich", University of Illinois Press, Urbana 2004, p. 189
20. ^ Doris Kaufmann (Herausgegeben), Geschichte Der KWG', Wallstein verlag, 2000, p. 643
21. ^ Gretchen E. Schafft, "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich", U. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2004, p. 190
22. ^ Doris Kaufmann (Herausgegeben), Geschichte Der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Wallstein verlag, 2000, p.638
23. ^ Doris Kaufmann (Herausgegeben), Geschichte Der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Wallstein verlag, 2000, p.642
24. ^ Doris Kaufmann (Herausgegeben), Geschichte Der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Wallstein verlag, 2000, p.652
25. ^ Most of the aforegoing interpretation was heavily facilitated by the political demands of the emerging Cold War; see Doris Kaufmann (Herausgegeben), Geschichte Der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Wallstein verlag, 2000, pp. 639-652.

References

• Sheila Faith Weiss: After the Fall. Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Isis, Vol. 101 (2010), 722–758.
• Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• Paul Weindling, "'Tales from Nuremberg': The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Allied medical war crimes policy," in Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Doris Kaufmann, v.2 (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2000), 635-652.
• Katrin Weigmann: "In the name of science. The role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today's scientists" in EMBO Reports v.2 #10 (2001), 871–875.
• Eric Ehrenreich, "Otmar von Verschuer and the 'Scientific' Legitimization of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2007 21(1):55-72

See also

• ex-Nazis
• Research Materials: Max Planck Society Archive
• Nazi eugenics
• Subsequent Nuremberg Trials
• The Doctors' Trial

External links

• "In the name of science" EMBO reports article about KWI scientists' wartime atrocities, with images of Verschuer
• "Skeletons in the Closet of German Science" Deutsche Welle article on Verschuer's research connection to Mengele