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Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Of course we liked the uniform and boots and all that. To build national unity, the Nazi's turned to blame: The Allies of the First World War were responsible for the country's economic distress; weak leadership of the s contributed to Germany's problems. And then there were the Jews. The Nazi's drew on old hatred and old jealousies; says Rienhard Spitzy: "[The Jews] were much slyer in business. And of course all that made for a strong and hard-line anti-Semitism.
But gradually their brains became fogged. They started to say, 'The Jews are our misfortune'. Records were made on the basis of physical appearance and ancestry. Partners had to be chosen with great care. Rienhard Spitzy: "I was affected by this when I married.
We thought that we should, that we could form a new ideal race -- and I chose my wife according to this line. Germans were regaining their pride as Hitler's aggressive diplomacy forced respect from European neighbors. At home, propaganda continued to find eager listeners.
Friedl Sonnenberg remembers: "Young people were the most excited by the propaganda, over ninety percent of us were behind everything that went on. Propaganda gave people a big boost in confidence for the first time. This book investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how this concept put its stamp on Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity, and on the Norwegian eugenics movement.
This is the first comprehensive study on Norwegian physical anthropology, and its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe. Publisher Open Book Publishers. Publication date and place Classification Northern Europe, Scandinavia. They conducted extensive surveys of the living national population, gathering data on bodily traits such as arm span, height and head shape, and comparing these measurements with similar data obtained from anatomical studies of human bones from ancient graves.
Working with these comparisons, scientists developed theories about prehistoric migrations, the mixing and settlement of various primordial races, and the eventual rise of the Norwegian people.
No present-day scientists claim credibility for prewar traditions of racial science, and racial classifications based on skull measurements appear to be a flawed, racist, pseudo-scientific relic of the past. Nevertheless, the Norwegian scholars who set out to explore the racial roots of the nation with the help of calipers and rulers were actually mainstream scientists operating within the established scientific discipline of physical anthropology and working alongside colleagues from all over the Western world.
Driven by the aim of charting human biological diversity and evolutionary history, physical anthropologists observed, measured and compared the exterior features of human bodies, and then used this data to classify humans into races in much the same way as zoologists classified animals into families, genera and species. If one wished to speak authoritatively about race, it was a great advantage to be an anthropologist or at least to be able to invoke the support of anthropological expertise.
In order to understand how the concept of a superior Nordic race gained and lost scientific credibility, therefore, it is necessary to explore how physical anthropology became a discipline of recognised authority on racial issues. Moreover, it is important to study the changing ways that anthropologists have drawn the boundaries between science and non-science in their field of research, and to attempt to understand how this has affected the scientific legitimacy of the concept of a Nordic race.
How can we explain that for a long period the Nordic race was considered to be a real entity that physical anthropologists could delineate, identify and describe scientifically?
How and why did that same concept subsequently come to be perceived as a dubious ideological notion based on weak evidence and pseudo-scientific reasoning?
This book helps to shed light on these questions by examining the activities of Norwegian anthropologists in their national and international historical contexts. Anthropologists in Western Europe operated on the international stage: they were connected with each other through personal and professional networks, and they presented their research findings in anthropological journals, textbooks and conferences aimed at international academic audiences.
The actual research, however, was usually carried out within a national context, was often financed by national funding bodies and conducted by national research institutions, and had the principal aim of studying the racial composition and history of the national or colonial population. Thus, although the history of physical anthropology was affected by the interplay of national, transnational and international processes and contexts, the scope, subject matter and societal role of physical anthropology varied between nations.
Facts and viewpoints that were considered scientifically valid among anthropologists in one country, for example, might elsewhere be deemed controversial or unacceptable. In the case of Norway, the rise and eventual fall of the concept of the Nordic master race was affected but not determined by shifts in its status within the international scientific world. Simply because they came from a small country, Norwegian anthropologists had a particularly strong international orientation, and therefore the history of Norwegian physical anthropology and its engagement with the idea of a Nordic race must be understood in an international context.
This book is not, however, a systematic comparative study, nor is it a general account of the international history of physical anthropology. Instead, Measuring the Master Race limits itself to exploring important historical connections between physical anthropology, racial science and the concept of a Nordic race in Norway and in other countries with links to the Norwegian academic community.
And all this research was entwined with ongoing academic, political and cultural tugs-of-war over Norwegian national identity. Measuring the Master Race traces some of these interconnections. The book examines how physical anthropological race theories, and the idea of a Nordic master race in particular, shaped the national narratives advocated by Norwegian philologists, historians, archaeologists and public intellectuals; it offers an analysis of the influence wielded by these academic debates and ideological struggles over national identity on Norwegian anthropology.
Eugenicists feared that the biological evolution of humankind had been arrested by anti-selective forces in modern society, and they called for an interventionist population policy in order to protect superior elements from being outnumbered by inferior ones. Eugenicists generally turned their attention towards individuals and families carrying those genetic traits assumed to be inferior. Some eugenicists, however, maintained that the primary goal of eugenics was to protect the superior races — first and foremost the Nordic race — against miscegenation and to help them expand at the expense of supposedly inferior races.
According to these eugenicists, physical anthropology was highly relevant to eugenics, since the anthropological mapping of inferior and superior racial elements in a population was regarded as a way of assessing its genetic quality. This book elucidates the relationship in Norway between eugenics, anthropology and the concept of a superior Nordic race.
In addition to the Norwegian edition of this book, Kortskaller og langskaller , 1 a descriptive overview of the history of Norwegian physical anthropology was published in Norwegian in by the anatomist Per Holck.
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