Revisiting Hateful Science: The Nazi “Contribution” to the Journey of Antisemitism

While this volume of the Journal of Hate Studies is devoted to “The Science of Hate”—research and knowledge about hate’s origins and manifestations seen through the lens of the empirical sciences—this contribution is a cautionary reminder that, like all human projects, intellectual and other, the sciences, too, can be perverted by its practitioners in the service of hate itself. 1 The case study is that of the Nazi Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, MD, (1896-1969), eugenicist and geneticist, and, specifically, his (1938) text “Racial Biology of the Jews.” Of particular note is the American “connection,” in supplying both supporting legitimation for the pseudo-science of eugenics and two contemporary examples showing that the ideas of von Verschuer and other members of the German scientific community are far from extinct and continue to play a role in far Right antisemitic movements. The accompanying photographs remind us that this work of hateful science was not confined to intellectual theorizing or laboratory work with lower-order animals, but was made real in the death camps under Nazi hegemony.