ow "mainstream" where the national socialists views on race and eugenics among contemporary biologists?

by ponylover666

Was it already considered pseudoscience in the 30's among academics or did these ideas have the support of professionals.

restricteddata

It depends on the specific beliefs (esp. in the case of eugenics, which is more complicated), but in broad terms: the "Racial Hygiene" of the Germans was already considered pseudoscientific by most scientists in other (e.g. US, UK, France) nations. That does not mean that the scientists in those nations had significantly "better" racial theories by the standards of today — sometimes they did, sometimes they did not. But the idea that race was some sort of simple blood-carried category, that there were "pure" race types, or that Europeans were in general split between three or four different "racial types," was largely not believed in other countries at that point. This beliefs had been popular in these other countries, but in an earlier periods (the 1910s), but had fallen out of favor with scientists over the years except among the truly hard-liners.

Eugenics is a trickier issue. In general eugenics as a basic idea was still popular in non-German nations, and indeed many commentators praised the most specifically eugenic of the Nazi policies, their compulsory sterilization law, which on the face of it looked far more "scientific" and also more just (in terms of due process) than similar laws on the books in many other places (including the USA). However in general geneticists had long since realized that sterilization campaigns of this sort would not have any meaningful affect on the gene pool (because you are only sterilizing those who are displaying a trait, not those who are carrying it). The Nazi sterilization policies, it is worth noting, were not heavily criticized in their day: it is only later, when eugenics itself became a four-letter word (e.g. the 1960s-1970s) that this became a major focal point of criticism of the Nazis.

The "Racial Hygiene" of the Nazis was easy to show as being a fringe or outdated belief in the 1930s and 1940s, and played a key component in anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns and attempts by anti-racist anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists to consolidate their control over the scientific communities in their own countries. I have written about this briefly here. As with all topics, there would have been dissenters: people who would have said, well, I wouldn't go as far as the Germans do, but many of the key concepts are valid, etc. But on the whole the German approach was seen as outdated and extreme, and a reflection more of German politics (anti-Semitic, anti-Slav) than "real" science.

The trickiness of this question is the acknowledgment that many of the Nazi beliefs were not uncommon for their time or were even "borrowed" from other nations, while also acknowledging that some of them were seen as extreme or pseudoscientific in their day. We do not have anything like polls of scientists about this from the time, so one's replies have to be somewhat qualitative and impressionistic. It will also depend which scientists one asks, e.g. geneticists vs. anthropologists vs. biologists.