The Long Shadow of Racial Science

The end of the Second World War did not spell the end of the science of race, neither in Europe nor in the USA. In many ways a crucial juncture of the twentieth century, 1945 is a less useful marker with regard to the demise of racial science on both sides of the Atlantic. After the Second World War, scientists interested in the biological foundations of human difference continued to exchange their research findings, communicated through letters, and met at conferences hosted by older and newly founded scientific organizations. Spun by racial scientists since the nineteenth century, the transatlantic web of scientific exchange, though drained of financial resources after the Holocaust, continued to sustain a lively community of scholars interested in the biological foundations and social implications of human difference. Under increasing pressure from the rising social sciences, racial scientists resorted to a set of rhetorical and visual strategies to present their research as valid science while accusing social scientists of being unscientific.

This chapter traces the postwar contest over scientific authority and political influence between the older guard of physical anthropologists and the rising group of social scientists in a transatlantic context. The charged terrain on which these battles over the meaning of race, science, and politics were fought was conditioned by the legitimizing role that the science of race played in the extermination of millions of human beings deemed “racially inferior” by the German National Socialists (Proctor, 1988). As the involvement of scientists in the racial hygiene projects of the Nazis became known, German biologists and anthropologists who continued their pre-war research on the biological foundations of human difference after 1945 found themselves increasingly marginalized within both scientific circles and political debates at large.