In Search of the "Aryan Blood": Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine)

Summary

Gives an all encompassing interpretation of how the discovery of blood groups in around 1900 galvanised not only old mythologies of blood and origin but also new developments in anthropology and eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. Boaz portrays how the personal motivations of blood scientists influenced their professional research, ultimately demonstrating how conceptually indeterminate and politically volatile the science of race was under the Nazi regime. Contrary to sustained efforts, the search for the Aryan blood did not materialize into the racial utopia that the Nazi officials had dreamed. Moreover, the monograph convincingly demonstrates how ambiguous the relationship between eugenics, seroanthropology and anti-Semitism was in Germany, not least because proeminent German eugenicists and race scientists were Jewish or of Jewish origin.