Bastard Studies
In 1908 Fischer traveled to German South-West Africa himself to conduct field research. He studied the "Rehoboth bastards", offspring of German or Boer fathers and African women in Rehoboth, present-day Namibia. He argued that while the existing mixed-race (Mischling) descendants of the mixed marriages might be useful for Germany, he recommended that they should not continue to reproduce. Fischer's recommendations were followed, and by 1912 interracial marriage was prohibited throughout the German colonies.
His ideas expressed in this work went on to influence all future German legislation on race, including the Nuremberg laws.
He founded the Society for Race Hygiene in Freiburg in 1908.
Fischer resumed his "bastard studies" at the end of World War I, with the Rhineland bastards, and continued through the beginning of the Third Reich. Fischer was prolific, for he was simultaneously working with Charles Davenport at the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.
Read more about this topic: Eugen Fischer
Famous quotes containing the word studies:
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)