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.
[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].