Month: December 2024

The Church, the State and the Nazi. This article is part one of series of articles that examines the role eugenics played, or was planned to play, in the Tinker Experiments, addressing the role of three key actors namely the church, the state and a Nazi eugenicist.

*A note of language: Whilst aware that the term Gypsy is a contentious one, I use it in this and forthcoming articles as in line with the language of the times in question.

Part one: a brief overview of the work of Nazi eugenicist, Wolfgang Abel.

Wolfgang Abel – an overview of the man and his work

Wolfgang Abel: Source: Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.

An ethical anthropologist with a desire to record the culture and values of Europe’s minority ethnic groups, or a well-connected opportunist intent on embedding his racist views and programmes in legislation and practice in Germany and elsewhere in Europe?  An examination of his work and rapid rise through the ranks of both anthropological research and the Third Reich, would suggest the latter.

In August 1938, Zoologist and Anthropologist Wolfgang Abel, a researcher from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics visited Scotland to undertake a ‘study’ of Gypsy Travellers living and travelling in and around Caithness.  The study involved the taking of photographs, measuring heads, hands and arms and taking hand and finger prints.  His visit received only passing commentary in the media at the time, with no questions being asked as to why, at a time when prescriptive race based laws and programmes  directed towards Jews and Gypsies were recently enacted and practiced ^[1] in Nazi Germany, a eugenicist with proven links to prominent Nazi leaders should choose, and indeed be welcomed and hosted by various elites, to undertake further studies in Scotland.  

The son of Austrian palaeontologist Othenio Abel ^[2], Wolfgang Abel moved to Berlin in 1931 to take up his first role at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics [[KWI-A]. Within a decade he had risen from the role of research assistant to head of the Department for Race Science and an appointment as chair of anthropology at the University of Berlin.  Positions which enabled him to further promote and indeed action his racist ideology and intent to eradicate those individuals and groups that he considered inferior and a danger to Aryan purity and supremacy, with further high profile positions and membership such his service in the SS-Rasse-und- Siedlungshauptamt [Race and Settlement Office] facilitating the instigation of the recording and measurement of the handprints, arms and heads of children of ‘mixed-race’ parentage with the intent of demonstrating their ‘difference’ and inferiority. Which in the case of children who were referred to as ‘the Rhineland Bastards’ in Abel’s research papers ^[3] resulted in the forced sterilisation of 385 of those children and young people in 1937.

KWI-A building during the Third Reich. Source: Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.

Driven by Alfred Wegener’s 1929 ^[4] work based on the fingerprints and handprints of Inuits of eastern Greenland, Abel’s output demonstrated an intense desire to situate these as key identifiers of inferiority [within minorities [Gypsies in particular], the disabled, the mentally ill and criminality] in both academia and Third Reich legislation. Output which included the publication of the journal article On Disturbances of Papillary Patterns. I. Disturbed papillary patterns in connection with some physical and mental anomalies (1936) ^[5]  Wherein, utilising fingerprint samples from the Police Identification Service Archive (Erkennungsdienstliches Archiv) of the city of Berlin,                             

Abel attempted to use defective patterns of papillary lines as genetic markers for physical and mental anomalies […] Abel classified these defects as genetic and associated them with a supposedly criminal disposition, for, Abel reported, in contrast to what he called his “criminal material,” he had not been able to find such defects in the review of 4,000 fingerprints most of which came from “German rural populations.” Abel even attempted to reveal connections between defective patterns of papillary lines and certain criminal offences like murder or burglary – an undertaking that was, of course, doomed to failure […]Yet, the study about criminals had given him another idea: The dearth of these defects in the rural population on the one hand, and the not all too seldom occurrence in criminals allowed the presumption that these defects frequently might appear in connection with other (mental and physical) abnormalities, and gave occasion to the investigation of certain groups biologically more delimited, such as the feeble-minded, mentally ill, deaf-mutes, congenitally blind […] Abel announced that he would publish the final results of his studies of the disabled in a second part of his paper, but this second paper never appeared. (Schmuhl 2008: 178:180).

Abel further tested his [flawed] theory of fingerprints as identifiers of inferiority and criminality  by immersing himself and his team in a programme of research targeting Gypsy communities ranging from Western Europe to the Balkan States including in Germany, Romania [1935] “to study Gypsies with the question of miscegenation and the environmentally determined differences between Romanian and Western European Gypsies.” (Schmuhl 2008:171), several Scandinavian countries – Sweden, Norway and so on – the ‘findings’ of which enabled the well-connected Abel to make contact in 1937 with Robert Ritter head of the Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Office[which during the second world delivered recommendations for sterilisation and abortion amongst the Gypsy communities], recommending that the ‘Gypsy Clan’ archive held at the centre should include fingerprints as an identifier of Gypsies as inferior, criminal, ‘cross-breeders’ a recommendation that was immediately put into practice.

Boosted by this, and indeed other achievements vis a vis his attempts to situate Gypsies as enemies of the Third Reich and a danger to the purity of the ‘Aryan race’, from early 1937 Abel and his team supported the Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Office with ‘mobile working groups’ which interrogated and carried out invasive examinations on members of the Gypsy communities, wherever they could find them.  Information gathered was added to existing records collated from church and civil registers and other sources, and thus a database of Gypsies living in Germany, which could be used for any means considered necessary by the Reich, was created.

And what of his intentions for Scotland and elsewhere in the UK?

Given the Third Reich’s ‘march on Europe’, their Aryan ‘race’ doctrine and Abel’s attempts to situate Gypsies as one of the key threats to that doctrine, I do not consider it much of a stretch to suggest that an underpinning aim of Abel’s fieldwork elsewhere in Europe would be to have a national database similar to that in Germany embedded across the continent.  A database that would enable countries to introduce programmes such as the Tinker Experiments, a programme designed to assimilate [or extirpate] Gypsies and Travellers living in Scotland.

I discuss this further in In part two of this series and examine Abel’s connections to the British elites of the time including Neville Henderson, Ambassador to Germany and the Fyvie born son of a Scots Presbyterian Minister, William Cosmo Gordon Lang, the then Archbishop of Canterbury.

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[1] Including the establishment in May 1938, by SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler, of the ‘Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Menace’ and ‘Gypsy clean-up’ week which took place 12th – 18th June 1938.

[2] A National Socialism sympathiser Othenio Abel was a key member of the secret group known as the Bärenhöhle [Bear Cave] at the philosophical faculty of the University of Vienna – named after a paleontological seminar room where people met.  The Bear Cave was an alliance of German nationalist university professors and university professors belonging to the Cartell Association. His National–Socialist sympathies, which he shared with fellow paleobiologist Henry Fairfield Osborn from the American Museum of Natural History, resulted in his forced retirement from the University of Vienna in 1934. Online at: https://www.derstandard.at/story/1338559407873/universitaet-wien-hochburg-des-antisemitismus

[3] “Abel examined 39 children from Wiesbaden und Biebrich, supposedly fathered by non-white occupation soldiers, of whom he categorized 27 as “Moroccan bastards” and 6 as “Annamese bastards’. Abel’s study constituted the foundation for the following decision processes. He made his own opinion known in an article entitled Bastarde am Rhein (“Bastards on the Rhine”), which he published in the February 1934 edition of the journal Neues Volk put out by the Race Policy Office of the NSDAP. Without any mention of his study, Abel unfurled an infamous agitation against the non-white occupation children, which was directed expressly to the political decision makers “in whose hand it lies to prevent the propagation of suffering.” With this he recommended in barely veiled form the sterilization of all of these “half-breeds”  were, in fact, forcibly sterilised in 1937.” Source:  Schmuhl, H.W (2008), The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute For Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927–1945 Crossing Boundaries 224:230, Springer Science + Business Media B.V.

[4] Wegener, Kurt (ed.), Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Deutschen Grönland-Expedition Alfred Wegener 1929 und 1930/31, vol. VI: Anthropologie und Zoologie, Leipzig 1934.

[5] In the Journal of Morphology and Anthropology, 1936, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1936) 1:38 Published by : E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. [Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly has a translated copy of this document which can be provided on request].

In November 2023 Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly travelled to Brockville, Ontario to undertake further research on the Gypsy Traveller children trafficked to Canada by Quarrier's [formerly know as the Orphan Homes of Scotland], three of which were her great aunts. The following gives an overview of the history of this practice and an introduction to the outcomes of her findings during this field work. 

Between 1869 and 1939 100,000 children were trafficked to Canada via the Child Migration Programme.  The programme was paused during the first world war and reinstated thereafter. It was paused again during the second world war and not reinstated in Canada by the majority of organisations.  However, the Fairbridge Society continued the practice sending 329 children to a Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia between 1935 and 1948 – 95% of which were not orphans.  The farm school closed in the 1950s – with the last of the older boys leaving in December 1951.[1]  Children continued to be trafficked to Australia up to the 1970s. 10,000 of these children came from Scotland, Quarrier’s Homes trafficked 7,000 of these children, many of whom were Gypsy Travellers including three of my grandfather’s younger sisters: Gracie, aged 9, Mary, aged 11 and Margaret, aged 14, at the time they were trafficked.  Prior to being trafficked to Canada, children would spend up to three years incarcerated at Quarrier’s village, Bridge of Weir, where they were prepared for a future in indentured servitude in the colonies. Quarrier’s Homes were careful to select only the fittest for trafficking as they did not wish to risk any child being rejected or returned to their distribution centre[1] in Brockville, Ontario as this would impact their tight profit margins.

We do not send any who are unhealthy or who are known to have pernicious habits out there.  We are just as anxious that the Canadian people will be satisfied with them as we are to have them placed there. […] What is the cost of maintaining the children? […] it would amount to something like £10 per head [Quarrier’s evidence in the Report of the Departmental Committee on Habitual Offenders, Vagrants, Beggars, and Inebriates in Scotland, 1895].

There was little of a welcome to Canada for these children, some as young as two years old, who became known as Canada’s Little Slaves.  The media of the time portrayed them as orphaned thieves and vagabonds who had been found wandering the streets of the towns and cities or the children of drunkards and criminals unfit to care for them and who had willingly handed them over into the ‘care’ of the unholy trinity of state, churches or charities.  As such, many of these children were treated as less than human by those who engaged them as indentured servants.  Girls as young as five years old working as housekeepers, quartered in cold attics and fed scraps, and boys of a similar age working in the fields seven days a week and sleeping in barns and dog kennels, one man [now in his 90s] reports sleeping with the dogs and being the last to be fed, even the dogs being fed before him.  Physical and emotional abuse was common place and there were a number of reports of sexual abuse, some of which were reported in the media at the time.

The fate of a number of children who passed through the Fairknowe distribution centre is unknown.  Many disappeared from state records a few years after they were put into service.  Others are recorded as having died from serious injuries while in service – there is evidence that a sizable proportion of these were at the hand of another.  Some of these children are buried in marked graves, others were not so fortunate at best being buried in unmarked graves in cemeteries or at worst on the farmland where they met their often untimely death.

Those thirty nine [39], the youngest just five days old, who were returned, or never left, Quarrier’s Fairknowe distribution centre are interned in a 500sqft [2] plot in the Old Protestant Cemetery in Brockville. Quarrier’s Homes provided no grave stones or markers.  During her visit in November 2023, and working with an archivist from the local authority, she was able to identify the names, ages, country of birth and cause of death of those interned there.  Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly believes that Quarrier’s Homes has a duty to make this right by placing thirty nine markers on that plot and intends to pursue this matter.

A dark time in the UK’s history and darker still that the Child Migration Programme was used as a cover to remove Gypsy Traveller children from their families as part of the Tinker Experiments, a programme designed to extirpate the Gypsy Traveller community via enforced assimilation and, for those families who continued to live a nomadic life, the removal and trafficking of their children to the colonies. The invitation in 1938 to Wolfgang Abel, a Nazi eugenicist, by Neville Henderson the then ambassador to Germany, to undertake invasive examinations of Gypsy Traveller children, and who during his visit met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other elites to explain his work to them, leaves me in no doubt that a programme of eugenics was in the making and if not for the advent of the second world war would have been sanctioned and actioned.

I worked on a whole series of other projects during those years [..] I chose the Gypsies as a group to test. They were already described as being in Scotland. I needed a trait that was genetically recognisable for my tests. […] I was invited to the house of the British  Ambassador. The Archbishop of Canterbury was also present, and I was able to  explain the nature of my investigations [Muller-Hill, 1988, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Oxford University Press].

Further information regarding the Tinker Experiments can be found at: The Uglier Side of Bonnie Scotland: the Tinker Housing Experiments The story of Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly’s three great aunts, and the resultant intergenerational trauma, can be listened to at the following link: 

Intergenerational trauma or blood memory is discussed in the aforementioned audio recording and further discussed in the following short film which includes the video diaries of Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly’s visit to Brockville, Ontario.  A visit driven by an understanding that if we are to heal[3] sufficiently to work towards the creation of transgenerational trauma free futures[4] for our children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren then our journey must start by embarking on the same journey our children took back in the 20^th century.  The film tracks that journey documenting her emotions, findings and what the next steps in her journey to a trauma free future might be.

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[1] With grateful thanks to Patricia Skidmore editor of the Fairbridge Gazette for the information on Fairbridge’s continuation with the child migration programme during and beyond the second world war.

[2] Distribution centre was the term used by Quarrier’s Homes to describe Fairknowe Home, the building where children were processed upon their arrival in Canada and where the waited to be selected for indentured service.

[3] The average family plot at the time was 150-250sqft the fact that Quarrier’s Homes saw fit to only purchase a 500sqft [and made no perpetuity payment, a common practice to ensure maintenance of a plot] is indicative of how they viewed or valued these children. I was informed that back in those days coffins could be double/treble laid and angle placed in a plot thus making it possible to intern many bodies is a small space.

[4] According to emerging data, intergenerational trauma occurs when the effects of trauma are passed down between generations.  This can occur if a parent experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and those ACEs impact their parenting.  It can also be the result of enforced assimilation or other systemic oppression.  The effects of intergenerational trauma have been documented in descendants of refugees, residential school children [First Nations Children in Canada] and Holocaust survivors.   Thus, demonstrating that the continuing impact of collective traumatic actions or events – in this case the attempted extirpation and/or enforced assimilation of Gypsy and Traveller children via trafficking and housing experiments – continues to impact populations, for generations.[2]  An impact which manifests physically [autoimmune conditions and so on] and emotionally [such as inability to form lasting personal relationships, low self-esteem and mental ill-health]. 

[5] Indigenous communities from across the world view a formal apology as a recognition of their pain and suffering, the beginning of a healing process and the opportunity to create transgenerational trauma free futures.  If current generations of Gypsy and Traveller families in Scotland who were impacted by similar traumatic actions and events are to heal sufficiently to work towards the creation of transgenerational trauma free futures, they too must be given a full apology with any and all reparation necessary to heal and move forward as equal citizens of Scotland.