Eugen Fischer - Attitude To Jews and Gypsies

Attitude To Jews and Gypsies

Antisemitic asides in his private correspondence provide evidence of his antisemitism. He was a racial antisemite, regarding the "Jewish question" as a "question of race". His answer to this "question of race" turned out to be more differentiated than that of the Nazi party ideologues. Lösch's statement that Fischer was "no anti-semite", but rather a "racist", misses the point.

The Jewish question was in practice the most pressing race question for the German nation, because the Jews were the only people of a strange race who lived within our volk in large numbers. The awareness of a separation in terms of blood, however, did not by any means exclude personal association with individual Jews. Even within the race hygiene movement I had sustained friendly relations in Berlin to the Jewish ophthalmologist Dr. Czeillitzer and undertook a joint scientific project with the Jewish serologist Schiff. This did not deter me from seeing the dangers that threatened the German volk as a whole from Jewry. I received the most flagrant impressions of this from my years in Berlin from 1927-1933., where one encountered Jewry at every turn in the economy and in cultural institutions and could always feel its close link with the rampant corruption prevalent at the time. The volkish and racial separation between Germans and Jews thus seemed to me a necessary demand to resolve the emerging difficulties for both sides. Through my scientific work I was at pains to work out the foundations to resolve this issue.

With Verschuer, Fischer was guest of honor at the opening of the Frankfurt Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question in March 1941. The goal of the "total solution" to the "Jewish question", was bluntly stated there, as the "Volkstod" ("death of the nation", i.e. genocide).

In 1944 Fischer and the theologian Gerhard Kittel published a book about "world Jewry of antiquity", a selection of ancient sources with an antisemitic perspective.