A Period of Doubt: Race Science before the Second World War

Abstract

‘It was the Nazis who perpetrated the deed, but men and women everywhere believed in the distinction between races, whether white, yellow or black, Aryan or Jew.’ This, in a nutshell, was the dilemma of race biology in the 1930s and 1940s. The deed was the single greatest crime in the history of mankind — the systematic extermination of six million Jews because, it was claimed, they belonged to an inferior race. The dilemma of race biology was that what men and women everywhere believed, scientists believed also — that there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. However hard scientists tried to disassociate themselves from Nazi racism by labelling it a ghastly perversion of science for political ends, the fact was that racism received its sanction in science.1 KeywordsRacial ClassificationPhysical AnthropologyCephalic IndexHuman HeredityMental DefectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.