FRIEDRICH KEITER (1906 – 1967)

Friedrich Keiter was a German-Austrian physician and anthropologist. He came from Vienna and his father was a doctor of philosophy. Keiter studied anthropology in Vienna. From 1929 to 1932 he worked at the university in Kiel and then went on to study medicine.
He received his doctorate in Graz in 1933.In 1934, he moved to Hamburg and became professor of racial biology. His main areas of research included ‘Race and Culture’ and ‘Ethnic Character and Racial Soul in Europe’. As a staunch National Socialist, he erased his grandfather’s Jewish origins from his family tree. From 1939 to 1941, he taught at the university in Würzburg. He was then called up for military service.

After the war, he was categorised as a ‘fellow traveller’ in his denazification proceedings and completely exonerated. Soon afterwards, he became head of a forensic medicine laboratory in Hamburg, before teaching anthropology and hereditary biology at universities again from 1958. After the end of the war, many of his writings were banned. Today, they can be found on the Internet on websites run by neo-Nazis.

Friedrich Keiter died together with his wife Margarethe in a plane crash on Cyprus in 1967.