A German Anthropology Professor’s Outrageous Theories of Race and Gender

In 1996, Dr. Rainer Knussman, an anthropology professor at the University of Hamburg, published a 524 page book entitled Vergliechenede Biologie des Menschen. Ein Lehrbuch der Anthropologie und Humangenetik (Frankfurt am Main: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1996). (Comparitive Biology of Humans: A Textbook of Anthropology and Human Genetics) in which he asserts that the behavior of Jewish people is biologically determined:

“Since the Jews were exposed again and again to persecution and legal disadvantages, they could only maintain hereditary lines that guaranteed a special ability to assert oneself in our European society. The law givers did not recognize, that in contrast to their own interests, they thereby effected a natural selection producing optimal results --comparable to the breeding of a Jewish elite.”

[As quoted in: “Alte Lehre zementiert”, Der Spiegel (No. 20, May 12, 1997): 218. This article also discusses the protest that took place against the appalling book at the University of Hamburg.]

Professor Knussmann’s book also provides physiognomic theories of gender. He asserts that boys with wider hips are more “feminine.” They thus have a more “cheerful emotional nature,” “more impressionability,” and “less leadership ability.”

He asserts that the male children of working-women tend to have significantly wider hips. He hypothesizes that working mothers can be linked to frustration in children, “which causes stress that inhibits the development of male hormones, thus creating a negative imprint on the typically narrow male hip formation.”

William Osborne