Institute for Biology and Racial Studies

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Ownership stamp of the "Institute for Biology and Racial Studies" in a book from the holdings of the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart.

The Institute for Biology and Racial Studies was an institution of the NSDAP High School in Stuttgart , later in Schelklingen .

history

The chief ideologist of the NSDAP Alfred Rosenberg , to whom the high school of the NSDAP as a whole was subordinate, spoke on February 7, 1940 with Walter Groß , the head of the racial policy office of the NSDAP, about the establishment of an "Institute for Biology and Racial Studies". From April 1, 1940, budget and material resources were available for the new institute to be founded; the establishment plan provided for a total of nine positions. The institute was "under construction" until the end of the war, the only officially opened branch of the high school was the institute for research on the Jewish question in Frankfurt am Main .

Walter Groß became head of the Institute for Biology and Race Studies in Stuttgart, and Werner Hüttig was his deputy. The institute was supposed to act as an interface between politics and biological science, since the "science of racial studies and genetics", in the words of Walter Groß, "represented the basis for the practical racial policy of National Socialism" and "these and a number of other basic biological knowledge were fundamental Significance for the worldview of National Socialism and its confrontation with the spiritual opponents ”is. The institute also carried out its own “racial” investigations. The results of the work of the institute should find their way into a “handbook for biology and race theory”, which was to be created on behalf of Alfred Rosenberg.

At the end of April 1944, after Hüttig's preparatory visit to Italy, Groß commissioned his deputy director of the institute to carry out practical “scientific research into causes and adversaries”. Research on family biology, folklore and psychology should be carried out in 13 municipalities north of Verona. The institute was relocated to Schelklingen in Württemberg in 1943 or 1944.

The planned high school and its branch offices built libraries of not inconsiderable size and also made use of stolen books. Large parts of the library of the "Institute for Biology and Racial Education " came to the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart after 1945 . Over 1100 volumes have so far been found there as part of a project on Nazi looted property research. In numerous volumes there were also references to previous owners from whom the volumes had been stolen.

literature

  • Léon Poliakov, Josef Wulf: The Third Reich and its thinkers. Documents. Berlin 1959, DNB 453814581 .
  • Reinhard Bollmus: On the project of the National Socialist Alternative University: Alfred Rosenberg's 'High School'. In: Manfred Heinemann: Education and training in the Third Reich. Volume 2, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-933120-4 , pp. 125-152.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Günther Seraphim (Ed.): Alfred Rosenberg's political diary from 1934/35 and 1939/40 . Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1956, p. 101 .
  2. ↑ Reinhard Bollmus: On the project of the National Socialist Alternative University: Alfred Rosenberg's 'High School' . In: Manfred Heinemann (Hrsg.): Education and training in the Third Reich . tape 2 . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, p. 125-152 .
  3. ↑ Federal Archives Lichterfelde, NS1 / 794
  4. ↑ Roger Uhle: New people and pure race. Walter Gross and the Race Political Office of the NSDAP (RPA) 1934-1945 . Technical University, Aachen 1999, p. 266 ff .
  5. ^ Maria Nüchter, Hans-Christian Pust: The search for Nazi looted property in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart - an interim report . In: Library Service . tape 52 , no. 2 . de Gruyter, Berlin 2018, p. 120-137 .