Герман нәсілшілдігінің идеологы: Ханс Фридрих Карл Гүнтер

German writer, advocate of scientific racism and eugenicist

Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (16 February 1891 – 25 September 1968) was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as "Rassengünther" ("Race Günther") or "Rassenpapst" ("Race Pope"). He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought. Günther taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg, writing numerous books and essays on racial theory. Günther's Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Short Ethnology of the German People"), published in 1929, was a popular exposition of Nordicism. In May 1930, he was appointed to a new chair of racial theory at Jena. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 as the only leading racial theorist to join the party before it assumed power in 1933.

Günther was the son of a musician. He studied comparative linguistics at Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, but also attended lectures on zoology and geography. In 1911, he spent a semester at the Sorbonne, Paris. He attained his doctorate in 1914, and in the same year enlisted in the infantry at the outbreak of World War I, but became sick and was hospitalized. He was declared unfit for combat, so to compensate for his inability to fight, he served with the Red Cross. In 1919, after the end of the war, he started his writing career. He wrote a polemical work entitled Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Der heldische Gedanke ("The Knight, Death and the Devil: The Heroic Idea"), a reworking of the tradition of German völkisch nationalist Romanticism into a form of "biological nationalism". Heinrich Himmler was very impressed by this book. In 1922 Günther studied at the University of Vienna while working in a museum in Dresden. In 1923 he moved to Scandinavia to live with his second wife, who was Norwegian. He received scientific awards from the University of Uppsala and the Swedish Institute for Race Biology, headed by Herman Lundborg. In Norway he met Vidkun Quisling. In May 1930 he was appointed to the University of Jena by Wilhelm Frick who had become the first NSDAP minister in a state government when he was appointed minister of education in the right wing coalition government formed in Thuringen following an election in December 1929. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Berlin, teaching race science, human biology and rural ethnography. From 1940 to 1945 he was professor at Albert Ludwigs University.

He received several honors during the Third Reich, notably in 1935 he was declared "pride of the NSDAP" for his scientific work. In the same year he received the Rudolph Virchow plaque, and in 1940 the Goethe Medal for arts and science from Hitler. In March 1941, he was received as an honored guest for the opening conference of Alfred Rosenberg's Institute for Research on the Jewish Question "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question". At the conference the obliteration of Jewish identity, or "people death" (Volkstod) of the Jews was discussed. Various proposals were made, including the "pauperization of European Jews and hard labor in massive camps in Poland". Günther's only recorded comment was that the meeting was boring. After World War II, Günther was placed in French internment camps for three years until it was concluded that, though he was a part of the Nazi system, he was not an instigator of its criminal acts, making him less accountable for the consequences of his actions. The University of Freiburg came to his defense at his post war trial. Nevertheless, even after Nazi Germany's fall, he did not revise his thinking, denying the Holocaust until his death. In 1951 he published the book How to choose a husband in which he listed good biological qualities to look for in marriage partners. He continued to argue that sterilization should remain a legal option, and played down the mandatory sterilization used in Nazi Germany. Another eugenics book was published in 1959 in which he argued that unintelligent people reproduce too numerously in Europe, and the only solution was state sponsored family planning.

Timothy Ryback, who examined the books retrieved from Adolf Hitler's private collection, notes that Hitler owned six books by Günther, four of which were different editions of Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Racial Science of the German People"). These were given to him by Günther's publisher Julius Lehmann, who inscribed three of them. The earliest, a third edition from 1923, is for "the successful champion of German racial thinking," while the 1928 edition bears a "Christmas greeting." The 1933 sixteenth edition, with a detailed appendix on European Jews, shows signs of extended, sustained use. Lehmann dedicated it to "the trailblazer of racial thinking." Ryback notes that Hitler included Günther's book on a list of books recommended for all Nazis to read. When newly appointed Thuringian Education Minister Wilhelm Frick, the first NSDAP minister in government, appointed Günther to a chair in "Social Anthropology" at the University of Jena in 1930 (for which Jena professors considered him unqualified), Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring demonstratively attended his inaugural lecture.