Background
Hans Günther was born in Freiburg on 16 February 1891.
Hans Günther was born in Freiburg on 16 February 1891.
A social anthropologist, his books were widely distributed in many editions during the Third Reich, continuing the work of earlier racial theorists like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston S. Chamberlain.
In 1930 Günther was appointed to the chair of social anthropology at the University of Jena as one of the first acts of the Nazi Minister in Thuringia, Wilhelm Frick.
Later, Günther became Professor of Racial Science at the University of Freiburg.
After World War II. Günther carried on where he left off as a political publicist and ethnologist, as if the Third Reich and the ‘Final Solution’ had never occurred. His earlier works were gradually reissued, including his biological studies of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in 1963 Frömmigkeit Nordischer Artung (first published in 1934).
Günther now updated his old organic philosophy based on the Nordic myth, to attack the Americanized mass society and the Soviet totalitarian State. The unrepentant doyen of Nazi racialists argued that mankind would do well to return to National Socialism as a cure for its ills.
He died in Freiburg on 25 September 1968.
Short Ethnology
(Sold more than 270,000 copies between 1929 and 1943 and e...)
Günther recognized that there were no pure races and that not all ‘Aryans’ were Nordic; equally, he did not regard the Jews as a race but as a Rassengemisch (racial mixture) in which the ‘physical and spiritual hereditary endowments of non-European peoples are predominant’.
In Giinther's anthropology, “the proportion in which the races are mixed’ was the decisive factor and his theories were used to justify Nazi legislation aimed at strengthening the German race. Gunther depicted the Nordic race as the great creative force in history whose threatened mongrelization would endanger the future of civilization unless its ranks were eugenically purged of all disintegrating influences. Foremost among these ‘ferments of disintegration' were the “non-European' Jews, a mixture of Asiatic and Oriental stock, responsible for such decomposing ideas as liberalism, democracy and socialism.
Gunther's pseudo-scientific race theories served as a convenient justification for Hitler's central idea, that the Aryan- Germanic races must unite in an apocalyptic struggle for civilization that necessitated the elimination of the Jews from Europe.