Heinrich Münter

Albert Heinrich Münter (born December 7, 1883 in Herford , † February 19, 1957 in London ) was a German anthropologist .

Life

Münter had been employed at the Anatomical Institute of Heidelberg University since 1920 . In 1923 he completed his habilitation in anthropology with a thesis that dealt with the skull construction of population groups in ancient Egypt. In the following years he put on the so-called Germanic skeleton collection of the university, which in 1941 was divided between the Institute for Racial Studies at the University of Freiburg and Carl Schneider, the director of the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, who was to reorganize it according to racial aspects.

In 1929, Münter was appointed associate professor in Heidelberg because of his work on the racial change of the Egyptians. Decisive for this were his research on the racial change of the Egyptian population, his hereditary biological work on the inmates of the Baden institutions for the blind and deaf and dumb and on the Moroccan children from Main and the surrounding area. In the following years he gave lectures on topics such as the theory of heredity and eugenics, elements of general biology and the basics of a general racial biology and the biological causes of the development of civilized peoples.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Münter was ousted from the civil service. In February 1934 he took a leave of absence from Heidelberg University and went to Great Britain. In Heidelberg he was listed in the course catalogs as being on leave until the summer semester of 1936, before he was officially removed from university service by the university management in the winter semester of 1936 on the grounds that his contract was not renewed (wife a communist !).

From 1934 to 1936, Münter was a researcher at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and at the Birmingham Museum. In 1936 he moved to Oxford University.

At the end of the 1930s, the National Socialist police officers classified Münter as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be in the case A successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS commandos with special priority.

Fonts

• Ancient Egyptians and Copts in relation to negroid components in skull construction , 1922.
• On the differential diagnosis of the Copts , 1926.

literature

• Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932. Berlin et al. 1986, p. 187.
• Felix Sommer: "Anatomie", in: Wolfgang U. Eckart / Volker Sellin / Eike Wolgast (eds.): The University of Heidelberg in National Socialism , pp. 653 and 658f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Münter on the special wanted list GB