Eugen Fischer was a German physician and anthropologist. After studying medicine in Munich, Freiburg and Berlin, he put forward his first racial theories during a research trip to Africa in 1908. He claimed that human ‘racial characteristics’ were inherited according to Mendel’s rules. These ideas have long since been refuted. Between 1927 and 1942, Fischer was the first director of the ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics’ in Berlin, which he had previously founded with Erwin Baur and others. The ‘theory of heredity and race’ became his main field of research. Fischer thus became a pioneer of National Socialist thought. In 1933 and 1935, he was rector of Berlin University, dismissed Jewish colleagues and filled the vacant chairs with like-minded people. He also became a judge at the Higher Hereditary Health Court in Berlin and was physician general of the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung.
Classified as a ‘fellow traveller’ in the denazification process after the war, he remained a widely respected anthropologist.
He was married to Else Walter and had three children. He died in Freiburg in 1967.
