Background
Eugen Fischer was born in Karlsruhe on 5 June 1874.
Eugen Fischer was born in Karlsruhe on 5 June 1874.
In 1921 he co-authored (together with Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz) one of the standard works of German racialism, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene (Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene). The pseudo-science of ‘racial hygiene’, an offshoot of genetics and eugenics, of which Fischer was a leading exponent, exercised a special fascination for the Nazis, providing a kind of zoobiological legitimacy for their crimes.
From 1927 until his retirement in 1942 Fischer was Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Eugenics in Berlin, one of the centres for the dissemination of the racial-hygienic idea.
In 1959 he produced a slender volume of gossipy memoirs, Begegnungen mit Toten (Encounters with the Dead), which carefully avoided mention of the millions of innocent people who suffered through the application of the Nazi racial theories he had espoused.
He died in Freiburg on 9 July 1967.