Re-Evaluating Scientific Anti-Racism: The UNESCO Statement on Race and the Politics of the Third Reich

• In Event: 455 - Regular Session. Racism and Anti-Racism: International Perspectives

Abstract

The paper explores the exchange of ideas between biologists in the United States and Germany from the 1930s to 1950s. The focus is on what became known as the new biological systematics, which formed the background of the UNESCO Statement on Race as one of the founding document of scientific anti-racism. The new systematics was an innovation in biological classification that radically departed from previous conventions to conceptualize species or races as fixed types that can be represented by single specimens. It instead propagated a population approach, according to which each species or race consists of a population of individuals with variable traits. With the experience of the Third Reich and the holocaust in view, the discarded typological thinking became over time identified with racism and totalitarian politics, the new population approach with anti-racism and democratic politics. This paper shows in opposition to this well established view that the population approach was in fact not only propagated by biologists in the United States, but by biologists in Nazi Germany as well. Based on archival documents the paper traces the development of the population approach across an international network of scholars and shows that it formed the background for the racial examination of people living in the Eastern European territories annexed by Nazi Germany during the war. The paper thus shows that the population approach was a central part of genocidal practices of the Third Reich and that its identification with anti-racism and democratic politics is far from adequate.

Author

• Stefan Bargheer, University of California-Los Angeles