In Search of "Aryan Blood": Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine)

Explores the course of development of German seroanthropology from its origins in World War I until the end of the Third Reich. Gives an all encompassing interpretation of how the discovery of blood groups in around 1900 galvanised not only old mythologies of blood and origin but also new developments in anthropology and eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. Boaz portrays how the personal motivations of blood scientists influenced their professional research, ultimately demonstrating how conceptually indeterminate and politically volatile the science of race was under the Nazi regime. A history of the short-lived preudoscientific discipline "seroanthropology", adepts of which claimed that it was possible to identify a person's race through blood analysis. Although, for at least two centuries, there was widespread belief in a connection between a person's origins and his blood (as manifested in expressions such as "pure blood", "Jewish blood", etc.), there were two factors that preconditioned the emergence of seroanthropology: the discovery of blood groups in 1900, and the disappointment of anthropologists with skull measures and physiognomy as criterions of race. Seroanthropology was especially popular in Germany, where it was seen as a tool to preserve the purity of the "German race" and was motivated by nationalism and antisemitism. One of their main tasks, as viewed by German seroanthropologists, was use of blood tests to distinguish a person of Jewish origin from the "pure German". Blood science was taken up by the Nazis in the 1930s. Although many German anthropologists were skeptical about regarding the blood test as a racial criterion, blood rhetorics were widespread in Nazi discourse. It affected not only publications of "Der Stürmer", but also the Nuremberg Laws and the writings of Nazi theoreticians. The belief of the Nazis in "blood defilement", which could come about not only through sexual intercourse with Jews but even by blood transfusion from Jewish donors, was common. The pseudoscience of seroanthropology bears part of the responsibility for the Nazi genocide as a motivating factor. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Emergence of Blood Science -- "Contagious Blood" in German Fiction and Early Blood Science -- Origins of Serology -- The Völkisch Notion of "Blood Defilement" -- Seroanthropology -- Jewish Physicians and Blood Science -- Postwar Blood Science -- Seroanthropology in the Early 1920S : Blood, Race, and Eugenics -- Frigyes Verzár and Oszkár Weszeczky : Seroanthropological Research in Hungary -- Surveying "Native Germans" -- Blood Type and Genetic Inferiority -- Völkisch Research -- Organizing seroanthropology : the Establishment of the German Institute for Blood Group Research -- Otto Reche and Racial Anthropology -- The German Institute for Blood Group Research -- Seroanthropology at its Height : Distinguishing Those with "Pure Blood" -- Studies of "Native Germans" -- Biased Research -- The Jew as Examiner and Examined -- Manoiloff's "Serochemistry" and Jewish Blood -- Seroanthropological Analysis of Jews -- Völkisch Propaganda -- Jews and Seroanthropology -- Blood as Metaphor and Science in the Nuremberg Race Laws -- Seroanthropology in 1933 -- Proponents of Seroanthropology -- Racial "Reform" under Nazism -- "Blood Defilement" -- Diverse Means of "Blood Defilement" -- Seroanthropological Research in the Third Reich -- The German Institute for Blood Group Research -- The Pedagogy and Practice of Seroanthropology During World War II -- Seroanthropology and National Socialist Medicine -- Seroanthropological Research -- Seroanthropology and Nazi Racial Ideology -- Clinical Serology Betr. u.a. Fritz Verzár, Lehrstuhlinhaber für Physiologie an der Universität Basel 1930-1956