1In the international literature on the history of historical demography, there is no doubt that Louis Henry and his associates “invented” the method of family reconstitution in the 1950s (Fauve-Chamoux, 2016; Rosental, 2003, 222-239; Knodel, 1988, 3-8 [1]; Flinn, 1981, 1-12; Wrigley, 1969, 81-86). According to this view, the “méthode Henry” revolutionized the study of demographic behaviour in the past by using individual level data: records of births (baptisms), deaths (burials) and marriages, contained in parish registers, and linked together into histories of vital events of all the families in a community. Usually, only the Swedish demographer Hannes Hyrenius, with his book on the Swedes in Estonia, is mentioned as a forerunner (Hyrenius, 1942; cf. Terrisse, 1975). To be sure, it did not pass completely unnoticed that in Germany, since the Nazi period, village genealogies (Dorfsippenbücher) had been published which contained the reconstituted families of the locality. Indeed, from the late 1960s, some American and French demographers started to use these publications as raw material for their studies (Knodel, 1968; Knodel, 1970; Houdaille, 1970a; Houdaille, 1970b; Knodel, 1975; Knodel, 1988).

2In this article, I want to add a largely ignored chapter to the history of historical demography by making three points. First, in German speaking countries, reconstituting families for a whole community started earlier than the Nazi period. It was done on a much larger scale than has been noticed so far, and it served a wide variety of scholarly disciplines as well as popular and political purposes. Secondly, not only were families reconstituted, but the village genealogies were also used for analysing demographic behaviour, often in ways similar to Henry’s historical demography. Thirdly, most of the family reconstitutions and of the demographic research based on them, were closely linked to racial science. Many of these scholarly activities helped to propagate and implement the racial policy of the Nazi regime, and many of the institutions and persons promoting them were strongly involved in enforcing it.

Family reconstitutions

3In early modern Germany, occasionally a village priest or pastor kept his parish register familywise, adding children’s births and deaths to the parents’ marriage entry [2]. Starting 1808, in the kingdom of Württemberg, all the parish registers were in this form: the incumbent assembled all the vital events concerning a nuclear family on the same page. A pioneer in ex-post family reconstitution was Otto Konrad Roller (1871-1936) with his 1907 book Die Einwohnerschaft der Stadt Durlach im 18. Jahrhundert in ihren wirtschaftlichen und kulturgeschichtlichen Verhältnissen dargestellt aus ihren Stammtafeln (The Inhabitants of the Town of Durlach during the Eighteenth Century, Described in their Economic and Socio-cultural Conditions on the Basis of their Genealogies) (Roller, 1907; François, 1982). For every inhabitant, he assembled all the data from parish registers and many other sources on a file card. Then, he ordered the cards into families and genealogies. He mainly used this material for social and economic, but also for some demographic analyses, such as marriage ages, infant and child mortality, migration. Roller, who had done traditional genealogy of ruling families before (Roller, 1902), claimed in the introduction of his Durlach book that this was an unprecedented essay in using genealogical methods for economic history. In contrast to most of the later family reconstitutions, Roller did not study a village, but a town. Moreover, he was hardly interested in fertility, but mainly in migration – which is considered a weak point in later family reconstitution studies, but was crucial for Durlach, completely destroyed by French troops in 1689 and newly settled after the 1697 peace. Roller’s work hardly had any immediate followers [3]. Only a generation later, it was cited as a model (Blendinger, 1940, 1, 15, 17-19; Krauße, 1940, 24).

4After 1918, there was a growing tendency to reconstitute all families in a community from parish registers, though for other purposes than Roller had done so, and with a definite focus on rural settlements. Pioneering was Konrad Brandner (1881-1939), a Catholic priest in the Austrian province of Styria. In 1920, he published a small booklet containing the genealogies of all the 333 families in a tiny parish for the period 1775-1919. In the introduction, he complained that, until recently, historians had been interested almost exclusively in leading figures, not in the masses. Similarly, genealogists had dealt with ruling and noble families only. A genealogy, however, which comprises all the people (das gesamte Volk) of a community or region, did not yet exist. As Brandner suggested, such a genealogy could be called Volksgenealogie (people’s or nation’s genealogy). Linked to data on professions, houses and farms, Volksgenealogie could reveal where each family had been living, and for how long. Immediately, Brandner turned this open question into a strong assumption: Volksgenealogie showed to the families that they worked the same soil on which, 400 years earlier, their direct ancestors had already won their bread. By making people aware of such continuities, Brandner meant to boost love for one’s native community and region [4].

5Clearly, this project was part of the broad Heimatbewegung, a strong intellectual and political current in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany and Austria, which sought to foster local, regional and national identity, and idealized what they presented as traditional life and peasant values (Ditt, 1988; Applegate, 1990, 59-107; Klueting, 1991). Encouraged by the success of his work on a small village, Brandner envisaged greater aims. He tried to create a Volksgenealogie for the whole province of Styria, and persuaded numerous priests to compile the genealogies of all their parishioners’ families. From 1921 to 1929, he published annual Mitteilungen über die Fortschritte der steirischen Volksgenealogie (Communications on the Progress of Styrian Volksgenealogie). As early as 1923, 75 priests were reported to be at work in their communities, which covered 12% of Styria’s total population. Although in 1926 seven village genealogies were allegedly completed, none was ever published. Brandner had some impact on genealogists in other Austrian provinces and in Germany. But in Styria, the organisation broke down around 1930.

6Clergymen and local amateurs were not the only persons interested in this kind of data. Anthropologists at the University of Vienna did research on the heredity of humans’ physical features and assumed links between physical and mental attributes. For his 1925 PhD thesis, one of their students, Eberhard Geyer, measured the ears of hundreds of inhabitants of the parish for which Brandner had compiled the village genealogy. Geyer assumed a connection between an abnormal form of the ear and an abnormal mental disposition, even a propensity to criminal behaviour. The genealogical data helped him to explore the heredity of the phenomena he studied (Fuchs, 2003, 261-263).

7In Germany, Johann Bredt (1873-1936), a Protestant pastor of the German minority in Transylvania, was even more influential than Brandner (Pinwinkler, 2014, 38, 191, 194, 423-424; Weiss, 2013, 265-266). He had compiled a family reconstitution for the village of Windau, in which he had served. He included the German-speaking parishioners only, not the “gypsies”, although they were also Protestants, and not the Romanian shepherds (Bredt, 1929, esp. 12). His work won the support of the Stiftung für deutsche Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung in Leipzig, a prominent institution in the network of völkisch scholarship (Fahlbusch et al., 2017, 1516-1526) [5]. They invited him to publish a booklet developing and propagating his program for Volkskörperforschung (‘research on the nation’s – or folk’s – body’, or ‘body populace’ would be a literal translation). The core of this research was reconstructing the families of a community from the parish registers and ordering them into genealogies [6]. Compiling a family reconstitution meant creating a “quasi transparent image of the Volkskörper”, showing its development over time, its composition at any point in time, the symptoms of its vitality and disease. The family reconstitution should then be analysed by many scholarly disciplines. Local history could expand it into an almost total history, demography would be able to practice a “quasi microscopic” approach to issues such as marital fertility and duration of marriages. Sociology, family biology and racial research (Rassenkunde) would equally find an excellent material in a family reconstitution. Moreover, it could be used for practical political and educational purposes, e.g. for population policies or for boosting the sense of local and national identity. With these aims in mind and after the pilot study on three small communities in Transylvania, Bredt designed a program for expanding Volkskörperforschung, first to all German communities in Transylvania and then to other regions in and outside of Romania. For this end, an institution would be required which would train the staff, enhance methods and coordinate the work of both local and general collaborators. In this way, Volkskörperforschung could help to vitalize and maintain German communities abroad, and ultimately the German Volkskörper as a whole (Bredt, 1930, esp. 5, 31, 53-55).

8Similar to Brandner and Bredt, other genealogists sought to rationalize their endeavours by turning from research on individual families to the totality, or quasi-totality, of the families in a locality (Trübenbach, 1929). They were strongly encouraged by anthropologists interested in heredity. In the 1920s, both groups started to cooperate.

9Walter Scheidt (1895-1976) [7] was the protagonist of this cooperation. Moreover, he set a model for combining anthropometric studies on local populations with historical demography based on family reconstitution, supplemented by some social anthropology. He fully deployed his methodology in the study on the population of the island of Finkenwärder in the river Elbe (now part of the city of Hamburg) (Scheidt and Wriede, 1927; Scheidt, 1932). On the one hand, he did detailed anthropometric research on the present population, photographing, measuring and observing all members of those families who had been living on the island for several generations. For every individual, he assembled this information on a form and added data on birth, marriage, profession, parents etc. For every family, he filled in a family form, with more detailed information on economic and social conditions, health, mental properties and family history. On the other hand, a family reconstitution was compiled from the beginning of parish registers in the seventeenth century to the present. This work took several years and was mainly in the hands of local experts and other assistants. In his first publication, Scheidt gave comprehensive information on the distribution of the probands’ physical properties, some aggregate demographic data, a detailed explanation of his methodology and samples of the forms he used. His co-author added an ethnographic description of the island (Scheidt and Wriede, 1927). After the family reconstitution was finished, the second volume analysed the demographic history of the island’s inhabitants. He pointed out that aggregate statistics of births, deaths and marriages deal with mere surface phenomena; only micro data on individual families can reveal “the subtler gearing mechanism of population change (das feinere Getriebe der Bevölkerungsbewegung)”. Moreover, he insisted that “population biology” (Bevölkerungsbiologie) required these data for all persons who had lived in the locality and period studied (Scheidt, 1932, 3, 59). Much of the analysis he did under the label of population biology is very close to Henry’s historical demography (see below).

10As a biological anthropologist, Scheidt wanted to find out which of the families in the original population had more, and which had fewer, descendants over two or three centuries. Linking these results to the data on physical properties of the present population, he hoped to determine which characteristics had increased or decreased. His tentative conclusion was that, on average, the local population of the late seventeenth century had broader and longer heads, slimmer faces and lighter eyes than the current inhabitants had (Scheidt, 1932, 90; cf. the critique of Scheidt’s method: Linde, 1938). In detail, Scheidt described all the procedures for compiling a family reconstitution, from parish registers to pedigrees, as well as the methods of statistical analyses, for he wanted his model to be followed by other researchers, with anthropologists and genealogists cooperating. Germany as a whole should be covered by a sample of local studies combining physical anthropology and historical demography, and all these investigations should be uniform in their questionnaire and methodology (Scheidt and Wriede, 1927, 132-133).

11Until 1936, Scheidt, his students and collaborators started no less than ten local studies in different parts of Germany, from the North Sea to Bavaria, from Hesse to Silesia. Not all of them were completed, nor did all the published ones fully cover both physical anthropology and historical demography [8] (Scheidt, 1954; Imhof, 1977, 117-118). In addition, many authors working at other universities and institutions cited Scheidt’s publications as a model.

12Starting in the late 1920s, there was a real boom in efforts to compile full genealogies for one or several communities. Instructions were printed, and marriage, birth, death and family forms were sold in great quantities. Family reconstitutions became a big business. The instruction manual by the Catholic priest Josef Demleitner and Adolf Roth, published in 1935 under the title Der Weg zur Volksgenealogie (The Way to Volksgenealogie), went through three editions and had a print run of 21,000 in two years (Demleitner and Roth, 1935). It described every step from transferring every marriage, baptism and burial from the parish register to a separate form through the reconstitution of families to the compilation of a printable “family book”. There, all the families would be numbered, arranged alphabetically and, for each family name, in chronological order. Cross references showed the lines of descent between generations. Such a “family book” was easier to read and much cheaper to print than pedigrees, which Scheidt and his team preferred. Another instruction manual, co-authored by Scheidt’s collaborator Willy Klenck, was equally printed in 20,000 copies within two years (Klenck and Kopf, 1937, 2^nd ed. 1939). It described the procedures for both ways of presenting a family reconstitution, a family book (Dorfsippenbuch) and a series of pedigrees (Stammtafelwerk).

13Interest in family reconstitutions came from a broad range of disciplines. Genealogy, under the influence of Heimatbewegung and Volkskunde (cultural anthropology of Germans), was transforming itself into ‘the nation’s genealogy’ (Volksgenealogie or Volkssippenkunde). Population studies were no longer satisfied by aggregate data and quantitative analyses of totals, but tried to distinguish qualitatively between more and less valuable families and partial populations. This change was stimulated by the booming sciences studying human heredity. Eugenics had a strong impact on all these approaches, and their agendas converged in the need for massive genealogical data with considerable historical depth. This is also true of many branches of medicine, from psychiatry to internal medicine, for they developed a major focus on the heredity of diseases. “German Sociology”, eager to distinguish itself from international scholarship, chose Volkskörper and villages as privileged subjects. Geographers and historians became increasingly interested in these approaches, under the aegis of Volksgeschichte (ethnic history) and Kulturraumforschung (interdisciplinary regional studies with a nationalistic bias).

14Many of the studies compiling and using village genealogies were explicitly interdisciplinary in scope. Moreover, new disciplines became established at German universities, such as population and race biology or racial hygiene (Weingart et al., 1988, 424-459; Proctor, 1988, 327-329; Weindling, 1989, 511-516; Lenz, 1983, 105-112). After 1933, research in these fields was often done with an eye on practical application, and not seldom were persons active, both as scholars and as political actors. For this reason, it is important to mention the institutions and organisations that promoted and used family reconstitutions. To be sure, they cooperated in many ways, but competition and conflict were equally frequent.

15In Nazi Germany, genealogy rose to unprecedented importance, because so many persons had to prove their “Aryan” descent (Ribbe, 1998; Weiss, 2013). Racial hygiene and population biology were crucial to Nazi ideology. That is why the Party, government and administration created organisations and institutions with an active interest in village genealogies.

16In spring 1933, the Nazi minister of the interior appointed Dr. Achim Gercke (1902-1997) as “expert for racial research” (Sachverständiger für Rasseforschung beim Reichsminister des Innern). His first task was to deal with cases of doubt which arose in dismissing the civil servants of Jewish origin. Gercke was perfectly “qualified” for this job, since, already in 1925 as a student, he had started a register of professors from Jewish families, which, in the following years, he expanded to other professions and almost half a million records. In 1931, he was employed by the Nazi Party’s headquarters for checking the “Aryan” descent of candidates for Party membership. In this position, he made plans for expelling all Jews from Germany. In his job at the Ministry of the Interior, he strove to enlarge his responsibilities. His aim was a Reichssippenamt (Reich Office of Genealogy) on top of a system of regional and local Sippenämter into which the civil registry offices (Standesämter) were to be transformed. With the help of genealogists, to be united in a single association, these offices would collect all the individual data from all German parish registers in a huge central register. The project was criticized for its excessive scope, and failed, due to conflicts with rivalling offices. In early 1935, Gercke lost all his functions, because of alleged homosexuality (Schulle, 2001, 31-160; Ribbe, 1998). His successor was Dr Kurt Mayer (1903-1945), holding a PhD in history, president of an influential genealogical association and department head in the powerful SS Race and Settlement Office (Rasse- und Siedlungsamt). He expanded his bureau in the ministry to more than 100 employees and had it renamed first into Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (Reich Bureau for Genealogy), later Reichssippenamt. Its main task was to decide on persons’ racial status in cases of doubt. Moreover, Mayer pursued the project of a central genealogical register for the Reich, but his attempt to create an infrastructure of regional and local Sippenämter had limited success only (Schulle, 2001, 143-374; Ribbe, 1998; Gailus, 2008 b).

17As for the project of a comprehensive genealogy of the German nation, a powerful rival emerged in 1937. The Nazi farmers’ organisation (Reichsnährstand), the Nazi Teachers’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund) and the Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP) formed a Working Committee for Genealogical Research and Genealogical Culture (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Sippenforschung und Sippenpflege). Together, they built a great enterprise for making family reconstitutions of every community in the Reich. Much of the work was to be done by local teachers, but the procedures would be strictly uniform. For this purpose, Klenck and Kopf published their instruction manual in 1937, and forms were printed in great quantities. Willy Klenck, Scheidt’s former collaborator, who had been a teacher, now was commissioner for Volkssippenkunde at the headquarters of the Nazi Teachers’ League. Ernst Kopf was department head at the headquarters of the Nazi farmers’ organisation. After some discussion, the committee decided that the village genealogies should be printed as family books, not as a series of pedigrees. With great emphasis, the manual insisted that the family book had to include all persons ever mentioned in the parish register, be they legitimately or illegitimately born, sedentary or mobile. The aims of the huge project were manifold – völkisch (racial-nationalist), staatspolitisch (political), cultural and scholarly –, but explicitly defined: boosting the nation’s cohesion (Volksgemeinschaft) based on the idea of blood and descent, giving deep insight into the life laws of our Volk (nation), assessing the inherent value of every lineage with regard to selection and breeding on the one hand, elimination (Ausmerzung) of alien and morbid blood on the other. In short, the genealogical survey was a precondition of a “successful and radical racial policy (erfolgreiche und durchgreifende Rassenpolitik)” (Klenck and Kopf, 1937, 8). Genealogists, politicians and scholars joined for a great aim.

18In practice, filling in forms, reconstituting families and publishing family books (Dorfsippenbücher) was organised by an Association for Peasant Genealogy and Peasant Heraldry (Verein für bäuerliche Sippenkunde und bäuerliches Wappenwesen), which was part of the Nazi farmers’ organisation. They published a printed newsletter Der Lebensquell (The Wellspring of Life), 1938-1943, reporting about progress of work and organisation. Regional and local working groups were established, chaired by the respective leaders of the Nazi farmers’ organisation, and with teachers as the main labour force. The aim was to compile family reconstitutions for all the estimated 30,000 communities in the Reich within twenty or thirty years; every year, 1,500 family books should be published. In May 1939, acccording to Der Lebensquell, some 15,000 volunteers had started to work in 6,000 communities; filling in birth, death and marriage forms was completed in 581 parishes, and 129 family books were ready for publication. The last news at the end of 1943 were that filling in forms was finished in c. 1,000 communities, and more than 100 manuscript family reconstitutions were done. The publishing house Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) published the Dorfsippenbücher in the Reich’s Peasants’ Town (Reichsbauernstadt) Goslar. The serial title was Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes (The Ancestors of the German Nation). Thirty village genealogies were released in 1938-1940 (Der Lebensquell, 1938-1943; Weiss, 2013, 274-296).

19During all these activities, the Reichssippenamt was a jealous competitor. Both sides fought against each other for access to parish registers, seeking support from superior political authorities. In 1943, they agreed that in the future only the Reichssippenamt should be entitled to organise family reconstitutions. In the meantime, however, the war had put an end to the work (Weiss, 2013, 273-297).

20Since the beginning of the century, some branches of science had been eager to use massive genealogical data. Then they were attracted by the chances that family reconstitution offered. The Munich Kaiser Wilhelm Institute [9] for Psychiatry, in particular its Department for Genealogy and Demography, headed by Professor Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952), is renowned for being the first research institution in the field of psychiatric genetics. With his brother-in-law Alfred Ploetz (1869-1940), Rüdin was among the protagonists of eugenics and racial hygiene in Germany. Ever since 1911, he argued and worked for collecting massive genealogical data, which allowed to follow all cognates of a sick person and prognose empirically his/her hereditary disposition to disease (empirische Erbprognose). Since there was no scientific proof whether or in which way mental disorders were hereditary, statistical clusters served as a base for eugenic measures of “merciless weeding”, such as sterilisation, with the aim of cutting the cost of caring for sick and deficient persons (Roelcke, 2003; Weber, 1993; Roth, 1984). Among the many efforts for encouraging genealogy to cooperate with medicine and science, there is Rüdin’s preface to the second edition of Demleitner’s and Roth’s manual. He warmly wished many family reconstitutions to be compiled following their guidelines (Demleitner and Roth, 2^nd ed. 1937, 3).

21In 1928, a big research program had started for making an inventory of Germany in terms of population biology and hereditary biology (bevölkerungs-biologische/ erbbiologische Bestandsaufnahme). It was generously funded by the German Research Fund (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft/ Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and, from 1930, the Rockefeller Foundation. Soon Rüdin and his institute were major grant holders among the many participating institutions and persons (Mertens, 2004, 239-242; Weber, 1993, 161-162). The coordinator of the program was Eugen Fischer (1874-1967), the director of the Berlin Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics) founded in 1926. The program was supposed to proceed by genealogical and anthropological studies of local populations, which should be covered as completely as possible. Scheidt’s ongoing work on Finkenwärder was cited as a model, and he was among the first recipients of funds. The products of the research program were published in a new serial, edited by Fischer, entitled Deutsche Rassenkunde (Science of German Races). 17 volumes were released in 1929-1938, but contrary to the original design, they were rather heterogeneous in methodology (Schmuhl, 2008, 83-90, 169-170; Roelcke, 2003, 54-55, 62-63). Scheidt (1932) was part of the serial, but other authors compiled only partial family reconstitutions and scanty demographic analyses (e.g. Göllner, 1932; Richter, 1936), or none at all.

22Some projects were too large and involved too many disciplines to be shouldered by a single institution. In the program Deutsche Rassenkunde, Walter Scheidt had started a family reconstitution study on ten villages in the Hessian region of Schwalm from the sixteenth century to the present. In 1935, he handed over the material to the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene (Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene) of Frankfurt University, directed by professor Otmar von Verschuer (1896-1969). There, Heinrich Schade (1907-1989) worked on it. He was a medical doctor, had joined the Nazi party in 1931, participated in a course on genetic theory, racial science and racial hygiene for SS-physicians at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in 1934-1935, and later rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (comparable to major). Helped by several assistants, Schade added more nominative data to the family reconstitution, e.g. thousands of medical records, especially on mental diseases and inborn abnormities, as well as anthropometric measurements of present inhabitants. In this way, the genealogical survey could be used for research questions of racial hygiene and hereditary pathology. As Verschuer underlined in a memorandum, this comprehensive inventory served not only scientific, but also practical eugenic purposes by “supplying data for the further expansion of sterilisation, marriage consultation and other measures”. When Verschuer had succeeded Fischer as director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie in 1942, Schade and other collaborators continued to work on the project there. Schade did a postdoctoral (Habilitation) thesis with part of this material in 1939, and in 1950, he published his work, allegedly finished in 1944, in two chapters, which were not related in any meaningful way. The first consisted of statistics on the frequency of diseases in the current population of eight villages, with special emphasis on mental disorders from schizophrenia and manic-depressive insanity to alcoholism, debility and criminality. The second chapter presented the demographic history of the same villages over three centuries with both aggregate statistics and tables based on the family reconstitution. In the 1970s, Schade handed over the family reconstitutions to Artur E. Imhof, the pioneer of Henry’s historical demography in Germany, who used them for further studies (Schmuhl, 2008, 205, 293-294; Sparing, 1997, 348-351; Imhof, 1977, 118-119; Schade, 1950; Imhof et al., 1990, esp. 60) [10].

23Other university institutes for racial hygiene and racial biology, too, compiled family reconstitutions and used them for historical demographic analyses. Würzburg and Tübingen stand out among them. At the Würzburg institute, the connection of research to practical politics was close, and the director was firmly anchored both in academic and Nazi organisations. Professor Ludwig Schmidt(-Kehl) (1891-1941) was trained as a physician. Since 1930 associate professor (außer-ordentlicher Professor) at the medical faculty of Würzburg, he turned from physiology and hygiene to racial hygiene. In 1934, he became leader of the regional Nazi Party’s Racial Political Office (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP bei der Gauleitung Mainfranken). Out of this party office, a university Institute for Heredity and Racial Research (Institut für Vererbungswissenschaft und Rasseforschung) emerged, both directed by Schmidt-Kehl [11]. He and his students studied race and demography in several communities of the region. They measured present inhabitants and classified them as “Nordic”, “Dinaric”, westisch, ostisch etc. For some of the same villages, they compiled more or less complete family reconstitutions and wrote more or less thorough demographic histories (called Bevölkerungsbiologie, population biology), often adding individual data from medical, police, poor relief and school records. Though usually the racial survey and the population biology were done by two authors and published separately (e.g. Dausacker, 1936 and Amrhein, 1937; Pfister, 1937 and Pagel, 1937), Schmidt-Kehl, as head of the research program, tried to tie the results together, as Scheidt (1932) had done, but with more confidence. Asking which lineages had fewer and which had more descendants after several generations, and which physical and mental characteristics the current offspring of either presented, Schmidt-Kehl concluded that, during the last two centuries, the “Nordic” features had decreased in his villages and that less gifted families had slowly replaced more talented ones (Schmidt-Kehl, 1937, 192, 195-196; cf. the critique by Linde, 1938, and the response of Schmidt-Kehl, 1938). The latter finding was mainly based on school grades, although one of Schmidt-Kehl’s doctoral students had produced good reasons to doubt their validity as indicators of intelligence and talent (Pagel, 1937, 5-6).

24The studies, many of them accepted as doctoral dissertations by the Würzburg medical or philosophical faculty, were usually published in the serial Schriften aus dem Rassenpolitischen Amt der NSDAP bei der Gauleitung Mainfranken zum Dr. Hellmuth-Plan (“Papers of the Regional Nazi Party’s Racial Political Office Concerning the Dr-Hellmuth-Plan”). 21 booklets were released in 1936-1941. Dr Otto Hellmuth (1896-1968), the regional leader (Gauleiter) of the Nazi party and head of the district administration (Regierungspräsident), earned nationwide fame for a plan aiming to upgrade the depressed mountain area Rhön in terms of economy, social structure and race. The studies on race, genealogy and demography were supposed to be of immediate use in this context. A major point in the Dr-Hellmuth-plan was to form impartible middle-sized hereditary farms (Erbhöfe) in the Rhön region where smallholders and partible inheritance predominated. In selecting candidates for future Erbhöfe, individual capability and health of husband and wife were not enough, the hereditary disposition had to be ascertained by genealogy and racial screening, based on data on health, criminality and school grades over several generations (Felbor, 1995; Hohmann, 1992, vol. 1, 81-191; Schmidt-Kehl et al., 1936). If in existing villages, it was difficult to achieve a radical change in agrarian structure and landed property, selection with the help of family reconstitution and racial studies seemed realistic in those cases where villagers were resettled to new places, due to expanding military training grounds (Glotzbach, 1938, 1, 8).

25Research in surviving communities could, however, be useful in other ways. A doctoral dissertation, based on family reconstitution, focused on consanguineous marriages in an “in-breeding village”. Combining these data with records of poor relief, police and school reports, the author concluded that many families had an inferior hereditary constitution. For this reason, sterilisation was justified, and had already been done in some cases. The author suggested that other persons should be declared not “suitable to marry” (ehetauglich) according to Nazi law. Although the researchers generally strove for the villagers’ goodwill and cooperation, in this case the printed dissertation arose serious discontent among the inhabitants. The village as a whole and some families felt seriously offended and accused their priest and teachers of having disclosed confidential information, which might lead to sterilisation (Helming, 1937; Felbor, 1995, 71-77).

26The connection of research to practical racial politics was less direct at the Institute for Racial Science (Rassenkundliches Institut) of Tübingen University, although its director Wilhelm Gieseler (1900-1976) joined the Nazi party in 1933 and the SS in 1937, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmführer (comparable to captain). Moreover, he was a close partner to the leader of the Nazi Party’s Racial Political Office, Dr Walter Groß (Kröner, 1998, 156-172). Gieseler had studied anthropology and medicine. At Tübingen, he was assistant professor (Assistent and Privatdozent) for anthropology from 1930, was appointed as associate professor (außerordentlicher Professor) in 1934 and as full professor of racial biology (ordentlicher Professor für Rassenbiologie) in 1938. In 1936, he became chairman of the German Society for Physical Anthropology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Physische Anthropologie), which was immediately renamed into German Society for Racial Research (für Rassenforschung). Inspired by Walter Scheidt’s pioneering work and the national program Deutsche Rassenkunde, directed by Eugen Fischer, Gieseler started a research project Schwäbische Rassenkunde, aiming at a racial survey of Württemberg (Gieseler in Bohn, 1940, V-XI; Hoßfeld, 2005, 349-353). From 1931 to 1941, he and his students went out to 18 villages in 10 districts, measured, observed and photographed the inhabitants. The results were usually published in doctoral dissertations, with detailed tables on the distribution of physical characteristics and a “racial analysis” (Rassenanalyse) assessing the relative strength of the “Nordic”, “Dinaric”, “Alpine-Eastern” (alpinostisch) and other elements in the “racial mixture” of the current population. Parallel to these investigations, though hardly connected by any overarching questionnaire or conclusions [12], the Tübingen scholars did family reconstitutions and demographic histories of the same communities. This part of the project was less tedious than in other regions, since parish registers in Württemberg were kept familywise (Familienregister) since 1808, so that reconstitution work had to be done only for earlier centuries. Sometimes a single author did both the anthropological and the demographic study, and published it in one volume (Bohn, 1940; Haßberg, 1940) or in separate articles (Heckh, 1938; Heckh, 1939). In other cases, two students wrote their theses on the same village, one on race, the other on demography (Gassmann, 1941 and Müller, 1939; Fritz, c. 1945 and Haußmann, 1939). Some of the studies were published in a special serial Schwäbische Rassenkunde, edited by Gieseler, others as articles in periodicals; still other never got published.

27Affiliated to an academic network of agrarian science, although related to the Reichsnährstand, the working group Die bäuerliche Lebensgemeinschaft (The Peasant Community of Life), aimed at “researching the population biology and sociological conditions of our rural populace (Landvolk)”. Avowedly, this Volksforschung pursued political goals: understanding how reproduction, selection and elimination had functioned in the past should help to sustain and breed the hereditary assets of the German nation (Schultz in H. Wülker, 1940, V f.). The group was chaired by Professor Bruno Kurt Schultz (1901-1997), who had a double career as a high officer in the SS (Standartenführer, comparable to colonel) and as professor of racial biology and racial hygiene in Berlin and (after 1941) Prague.

28An early product of the working group Die Bäuerliche Lebensgemeinschaft was Stella Seeberg’s postdoctoral thesis, a demographic, social and economic history of the Brandenburg village Kuhbier from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Based on family reconstitution, archival sources and interviews, the study focused on the issue whether, or to what extent, the village was a living community, tied together by kinship and consanguinity. Seeberg found that, following the liberal agrarian reforms of the nineteenth century, there were “radical changes in the biological foundations of the community”, separating peasant owners from labourers – a cleavage which Nazism claimed to overcome (Seeberg, 1938, esp. 110).

29Dr Heinz Wülker (1911-1943) stands out in the group. He had studied science with a focus on heredity and was employed by the headquarters of the Nazi farmers’ organisation. In 1940, he published his Berlin postdoctoral thesis on the population biology of three villages on the outskirts of Hanover, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Helped by a local expert and several assistants from the farmer’s organisation, he had compiled a family reconstitution, following the Klenck and Kopf manual. Linking these data to archival sources on land holding and taxation, he presented a historical demography focused on social differentials. He was interested in the impact of inheritance patterns and social change induced by the industrialization of the fast growing city nearby. In his office, he had access to printed and manuscript village genealogies and used them for comparisons. A major question was which lineages had fewer or more descendants than average. Although Wülker followed the lives of offspring even beyond the villages studied, he could not find a clear correlation between genetic value, measured by economic success and status achieved, on the one hand, and the number of descendants over several generations, on the other. Once full genealogies including data on social status were available in great quantities, Wülker hoped that it might be possible to make prognoses of a person’s capabilities, empirically based on the ancestors’ accomplishments. He borrowed here the concept of empirische Erbprognose from the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, applying it to social status and achievement instead of mental disease (H. Wülker, 1940, 95-96, 121; cf. Pinwinkler, 2014, 40-41, 462; Weiss, 2013, 298-300).

30Irmgard Kothe also published her study of three small villages in different parts of Mecklenburg in the serial Bäuerliche Lebensgemeinschaft. She, too, had produced a family reconstitution following the Klenck and Kopf instruction. Her historical demography was firmly embedded in social and economic history, built on record linkage. Thus, she analysed social differentials in nuptiality, fertility and mortality. By comparing the three villages, she examined the impact of diverse socio-economic and institutional settings. She was especially interested in migration, and collected data on out-migrants by interviews and archival research in the surrounding villages and towns. On this basis, she explored their social mobility and demographic behaviour over several generations (Kothe, 1941).

31Among historians, some attempted to narrow the gap between humanities and science by adding quantitative methods, including historical demography, to their toolkit. They mostly focused on regional history. After World War I, there was a boom in interdisciplinary regional studies, especially in those parts of Germany and Austria that were close to areas lost in the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. Turning away from antiquarian regional history, newly created institutes tried to combine historical, geographical, anthropological, linguistic, socio-economic and demographic approaches. For the new paradigm, called Volksgeschichte, the German Volk, not princes and elites, was the cardinal actor in history (Oberkrome, 1993). The strategic aim of regional studies was to prove that the German Volk and culture were dominant far beyond the current frontiers of the Reich. In this context, Volkskörperforschung, family reconstitution and historical demography became relevant.

32Adolf Helbok (1883-1968) was one of the protagonists of Volksgeschichte and Volkskunde. After losing his professorship in Innsbruck (Austria) because of his open Nazi activism, he was called to Leipzig University in 1935, as director of the well-established Seminar for Regional History and Settlement Research (Seminar für Landesgeschichte und Siedlungskunde), renamed into Institut für Landes- und Volksgeschichte (Oberkrome, 1993, 130-133; Pinwinkler, 2014, 85-86, 96-98, 146-157, 431-432; Pesditschek, 2019). Population biology was defined as one of the pillars of the new approach. For this purpose, the Leipzig Institute hoped to use the village genealogies, compiled by the Ahnen des deutschen Volkes project. In 1938, the Institute reported that some twenty villages had already been studied in this way (Ranzi, 1938). But hardly any family reconstitution study was published, except for the work of one of Helbok’s PhD students (Krauße, 1937; Krauße, 1940).

33At Innsbruck, not only Helbok, but also the historian and cultural anthropologist Hermann Wopfner (1876-1964) and the geographer Hans Kinzl (1898-1979) were well connected to the networks of German völkische Wissenschaft, in the struggle for the German character of Tyrolia, including Southern Tyrolia (Alto Adige). Inspired by Johann Bredt and Walter Scheidt, Kinzl, the head of the “Innsbruck school of historical population geography”, encouraged his students to do historical geography of rural communities, including demography, based on parish registers and more or less complete family reconstitutions (Pinwinkler, 2014, 174-203, 437-438; Weiss and Münchow, 1998, 104-112; Fliri, 1996). In terms of historical demography, Hedwig Reichle’s PhD thesis was the first major outcome of the “Innsbruck school” (Reichle, 1944).

34At Munich University, as elsewhere, historians began to turn to Volksgeschichte and Volkskörperforschung. Friedrich Blendinger did a family reconstitution for the town of Weißenburg, Bavaria, 1580-1720. His published PhD thesis, however, presented rather aggregate figures with a focus on migration, leaving the “real biological history” of the population to a second volume, which was never released (Blendinger, 1940, 121).

35Not only in Leipzig, scholars made increasingly use of the village genealogies Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes. Among the first ones was Otto Heidt, the managing director of the association which organised this huge project, and member of the SS in the rank of Obersturmbannführer (comparable to lieutenant colonel). Combining demographic and economic data for two Baden villages in his PhD thesis, he tried to show how disastrous were the effects of partible inheritance (Heidt, 1940). Heinz Wülker and his father Ludwig, himself compiler of a Dorfsippenbuch, were equally quick in using these family reconstitutions for demographic analyses (H. Wülker, 1940; L. Wülker, 1941; L. Wülker, 1944; L. Wülker, 1947) [13].

36“German Sociology” favoured village studies, and was open to racial science’s approach of historical demography (cf. Pinwinkler, 2014, 225-236; Schnitzler, 2012). A good example is Ohl’s PhD thesis in sociology on the “population biology” of a borough near Hamburg, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Although the author did not compile a full family reconstitution, he used individual level data from parish registers and took the Tübingen racial scientists’ work as a model for demographic analysis (Ohl, 1941).

37After 1945, the research design for community studies, combining anthropometric measures with historical-demographic analysis based on family reconstitution, was still relevant in some cases. Heinrich Schade was happy to publish major results of the Schwalm project (Schade, 1950). Wilhelm Gieseler of Tübingen University had to wait longer than other professors of racial science for being readmitted as professor of anthropology (Kröner, 1998, 150-173). His disciples, however, continued the racial (now “anthropological”) survey of Württemberg. Some of his MD (or PhD) students had started their research already during the Nazi period and finished the thesis after the end of the war (Necker, 1949; Härter, 1949); others joined the project after 1945 (Pöpelt, 1949) [14]. One did physical anthropology only (Necker, 1949), another added some demography (Pöpelt, 1949 and 1958), and yet another did nothing but historical demography (Härter, 1949; cf. Heckh, 1952).

38In general, however, (physical) anthropology (as former Rassenkunde was now called) dissolved its connection to genealogy and historical demography. Anthropometric surveys of local or regional populations stayed on the agenda of German anthropologists, many of whom had already earned their reputation in the Nazi period, such as Ilse Schwidetzky (1907-1997), who became professor of anthropology at the University of Mainz (Schwidetzky and Walter, 1967; cf. Massin, 1999, 23-42; Lüddecke, 2000).

39Historical demography, based on family reconstitution, hardly continued in Germany or Austria after 1945. An exception is the Geographical Institute of the University of Innsbruck, where Hans Kinzl and his successor Franz Fliri (1918-2008) continued and strengthened the tradition of local historical geography, with a focus on demography based on microdata, often family reconstitution. From 1946 to the 1970s, their graduate and PhD students authored more than thirty papers and PhD theses of this type (Pinwinkler, 2014, 174-203, 437-438; Weiss and Münchow, 1998, 104-112; Fliri, 1996).

40Compiling and publishing family reconstitutions in the form of village genealogies continued and increased after the fall of Nazism. During the first decades, often the same persons who had already been at work in the huge Nazi project Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes, resumed their task. When a new generation of genealogists and amateur historians took over, the efforts for local family books became more and more uncoupled from the political and ideological context of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1998, a bibliography listed 1,562 local family books, (with few exceptions) for German-speaking communities, including previously German-speaking communities in East Central Europe (Weiss and Münchow, 1998).

Historical demography

41If, in the project Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes, publishing village genealogies was an important aim in itself, most of the other family reconstitutions compiled from the 1920s to 1945 were never printed, but treated as a semi-finished product to be analysed with a questionnaire of population biology (Bevölkerungsbiologie). Some of the key statistics were the same as in historical demography developed in France during the 1950s. Until 1945, Walter Scheidt’s 1932 book on Finkenwärder was cited as a model, again and again. To be sure, he gave some aggregate statistics, such as total number of inhabitants, birth, death and marriage rates. But for analysing demographic behaviour and its change over time, he found the results based on individual level data much more relevant. The subjects treated in detailed tables and discussions included: mean ages at first marriage; mean number of children born in completed first marriages by marriage age; foetal, neonatal, infant, child, adult and maternal mortality; probabilities of marrying and dying by age groups; consanguineous marriages by degree of consanguinity; proportions of completed marriages and proportions of remarriages by birth cohort. Scheidt’s statistics were rather sophisticated, often accompanied by measures of significance (Scheidt, 1932). Heinrich Schade not only took over the Schwalm family reconstitutions from Scheidt, but also carefully followed many of his statistical methods in order to compare the Hessian villages with Finkenwärder. In addition to aggregate statistics, Schade published tables on mean ages at first marriage; mean number of children born in completed first marriages by marriage age; infant and child mortality; probabilities of marrying; bridal pregnancy and prenuptial births (Schade, 1950, 47-75).

42Most of the studies originating from the Institute for Heredity and Racial Research of Würzburg University did not meet the standard set by Scheidt, although its director claimed to have followed his method (Schmidt-Kehl, 1937, 178-179). Some authors reconstituted only selected families (e.g. Müller, 1941), whereas Scheidt had insisted on covering all persons who had lived in the locality and period studied. Others focused on a narrow set of questions, such as consanguineous marriages (Helming, 1937). Most did not indicate the specifications that would be required for comparing their results to those of other studies. They tabulated mean age at marriage, without saying whether it applied to all marriages or first marriages only; or they gave mean number of children born, without making clear whether the figures concerned all marriages or completed first marriages only (Schmidt-Kehl, 1937, 181-182, 185; Pagel, 1937, 23-26; Amrhein, 1937, 17, 22; Zwerenz, 1937, 9-10, 16-17; Glotzbach, 1938, 13-14, 25-27).

43At the Tübingen Institute for Racial Science, population biology followed a more elaborate and consistent methodology. Dr Gotthold Heckh (1909-1953) (Ehrhardt and Czarnetzki, 1986, 86) seems to have acted as coordinator for the demographic side of Schwäbische Rassenkunde. Supervised by professor Gieseler, he had embarked on a village study in 1932, first doing the anthropometric measurements and racial observations, then the population biology. Of course, he used the Württemberg family registers for the nineteenth and twentieth century; for the earlier period, beginning in the late sixteenth century, he compiled a family reconstitution in a shortened procedure, adding births and deaths directly to the marriage concerned, on a family form. As usual, he gave some aggregate statistics on population size, birth, death and marriage rates. Based on the family reconstitution, Heckh calculated marriage ages, both for all persons marrying for the first time (i.e. including single persons marrying a widowed partner) and only for marriages where groom and bride were single. Here and for most of the crucial results, he published tables on the distribution, in addition to means. He was interested in women’s age at first childbirth including premarital births, as well as age at last childbirth in completed first marriages (of both partners). As for marital fertility, the number of children born in completed first marriages (of both husband and wife) was crucial, broken down into multiple categories according to women’s marriage age. An indicator for detecting family limitation by stopping, beside women’s age at last childbirth, was the number of children born in the first, second and third five-year-span of the marriage. Apparently, Heckh was not familiar with age-specific marital fertility rates. He computed foetal and infant mortality, and estimated the proportion of survivors to age 14 not by record linkage, but by comparing the number of children in the confirmation register to that of baptisms fourteen years earlier. He broke down the rate of survivors to age 1 and 14 according to the number of children ever born in the respective family, and found that in very large families, infant and child mortality were above average. He concluded that these mothers did not breastfeed their babies, thus causing both excessive infant mortality and short birth intervals (Heckh, 1939). The other Tübingen studies, MD or PhD theses, explicitly followed Heckh’s steps in compiling the family reconstitution and analysing their data; they mostly computed the same statistics and published comparable tables (Müller, 1939; Haßberg, 1940; Haußmann, 1939) [15].

44The authors of the group Die bäuerliche Lebensgemeinschaft studied the population biology of peasant communities not in connection with racial-anthropological characteristics, but in the context of social and economic conditions. Linking individual level data on landholding and taxation to the family reconstitution, they aimed at a demography focusing on social differentials. Age at marriage, origin of marriage partners, number of children born, birth intervals, women’s age at first and last childbirth, infant and child mortality were all broken down according to social class: peasants with large holdings – smallholders – land-poor and landless peasants. Moreover, Kothe, in her area of impartible inheritance, compared men’s age at marriage to the age when they took over the farm. She and Seeberg neglected, however, some of the specifications on which Scheidt and the Tübingen group had insisted. Kothe calculated age at marriage, number of children born and women’s age at last childbirth for all marriages, and, in her tables, often gave only percentages, not the number of cases. In this regard, Wülker was more careful. He computed marriage age for first marriages of both partners, number of children born and age at last childbirth for completed first marriages of both partners (Kothe, 1941, 55-63; Seeberg, 1938, 46-51, 67-74; H. Wülker, 1940, 13-15).

45For all the demographic studies in Germany from the 1920s to the 1940s (critical, though incomplete survey: Pröbsting, 1941), a key question was when and where family limitation had started. Similar to French démographie historique in the 1950s and 1960s (Rosental, 2003, 215-239), finding out more about this issue was a major incentive for turning from aggregates, such as crude birth rates, to individual level data and family reconstitution. If in late nineteenth century, birth control may have largely seemed to be the problem of France, not Germany, after the turn of the century and in particular after the First World War, it became clear that in Germany too, family limitation was practised on a massive scale. That is why demographic pamphlets on “The Decline of Births and the Fight against it, the Vital Issue for the German Nation” and “Nation without Youth” met so much attention (Burgdörfer, 1929; Burgdörfer, 1932; cf. Vienne, 2006; Bryant, 2010). In line with a long-lasting debate in agrarian science and politics about impartible vs. partible inheritance, one of the issues discussed in German historical demography was which of the two was to be blamed for the spread of birth control even into the countryside (Heidt, 1940; Röhm, 1941, 400-403, 410-412; cf. H. Wülker, 1940, 27-28, 33; Schlumbohm, 2000).

46Migration was a key topic in many studies. What were the consequences of the rural exodus for the cherished peasant “blood”, and for the Volkskörper as a whole (H. Wülker, 1940, 97-125; Kothe, 1941, 72-88)? The hot problem was whether outmigration implied a drain of the genetically more valuable part of the peasantry. Population biologists tried to find answers by linking school grades and data about status to family reconstitutions (Schmidt-Kehl, 1937, 192-196; Müller, 1941, 45-60).

47For, with the rise of Eugenics, the concern was not just about quantities, the decreasing number of births and people, it was more and more about degeneration, the diminishing quality of successive generations (Weingart et al., 1988; Weindling, 1989). Social and political debates were dominated by the obsessive notion that the more cultivated, intelligent and talented families of the upper and middle class procreated much less than the minderwertigen (less valuable) lower classes. If this seemed to be a proven fact in the present, historical studies in population biology aimed at finding out whether, to what extent and since when this had been true in the past. Heinz Wülker, the expert in the headquarters of the Nazi farmers’ organisation, studied the issue both in the present and in the past (Wülker, 1939 and 1940). For the long run over several generations and centuries, combining genealogical data with measures of intelligence and achievement collected in current and recent populations appeared as a possible way to find answers, though few researchers were bold enough to claim having found convincing empirical results, as Schmidt-Kehl did (see above). Exploring differentials in demographic behaviour within a generation was less problematic. That is what several of the scholars working on family reconstitutions, such as Wülker and Kothe, actually studied. Whereas, in Wülker’s villages near the city of Hanover, already during the nineteenth century, smallholders had more children than owners of large farms, Seeberg’s and Kothe’s findings were more in line with Eugenists’ anxieties: in Kuhbier and some Mecklenburg villages, land-rich peasants produced more offspring than poorer families till the mid-nineteenth century; later, however, labourers had the largest families, because the rural upper class turned to family limitation (H. Wülker, 1940, 11-13; Seeberg, 1938, 46-50, 67-69; Kothe, 1941, 55-58). On the other hand, in a Saxon village, smallholders had more children than the owners of large holdings already during some periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Krauße, 1940). In a set of Tyrolean villages, farmers usually had more children than artisans and labourers, from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1930s. But the largest families were on middle-sized holdings, not on the largest farms (Reichle, 1944, 102-108).

48Not satisfied with the findings about the village they studied, many authors compared with the results of other studies. Differential reproduction (unterschiedliche Fortpflanzung) was brought into focus, when Heckh gave a comparative synthesis of the demographic results achieved by the Tübingen Institute for Racial Science, now renamed into Anthropological Institute (Heckh, 1952). His conclusion was that, in Württemberg villages, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, rural elites and land-rich peasants generally had more offspring than land-poor and landless families. This was true not only in terms of children ever born, but also of children surviving to age 14. In the twentieth century, however, these social differentials were evened out, due to family limitation. Interestingly, as late as 1952, Heckh connected social class with racial difference, at least in those villages where, due to impartible inheritance, social classes were rather stable. There, an anthropometric survey had found that owners of large farms were taller and had broader faces than smallholders. Heckh boldly concluded that social differences in early modern and modern times were a consequence of racial separation in the Migration Period during the decline of the Roman Empire. Drawing direct lines of continuity from present day anthropometric observations to early medieval archaeological findings may seem a striking contrast to the elaborate methodology of the Tübingen group’s historical demography. Some of the Volksgeschichte historians, however, also assumed a strong continuity of the German “tribes” from the end of the Migration Period to the present (Ditt, 2005, 434; Oberkrome, 1993, 131-133, cf. 71-73).

Family reconstitutions and racial policy

49Most of the work on family reconstitutions done in German-speaking areas between 1920 and 1945 was inspired by some kind of völkisch ideology and was meant to boost it. Since 1933, several protagonists and users of family reconstitutions explicitly pointed out that they created a database that helped to implement “a radical racial policy”, in terms of both selection and elimination, as Klenck and Kopf told the collaborators of the huge Dorfsippenbücher project (see above). Professor von Verschuer argued that the Schwalm family reconstitution, enriched by medical records, served practical eugenic purposes by “supplying data for the further expansion of sterilisation” and other measures (see above). This is exactly what the inhabitants of an “in-breeding village” of the Rhön feared when they learnt about the published results of a family reconstitution study of their community. Research of this kind could as well be used for positive action, such as selecting candidates for newly created impartible family farms, in the plan for economic and racial improvement of the Rhön region (see above).

50Were all these assertions nothing but rhetorical devices for mobilising support from political authorities and funding agencies? It is true that the Verschuer quotation is from a letter to the German Research Fund (Schmuhl, 2008, 293). Only archival research will yield a thorough answer to the question whether, or to what extent, family reconstitutions were in fact instrumental in measures of persecution, sterilisation, expulsion and murder. Most of the existing studies on Nazi racial and eugenic policy do not focus on the specific issue of which kind of genealogical evidence was used. In spite of that, some points can be made.

51In the village genealogies and studies based on family reconstitution that I have looked at, I have hardly found any Jews mentioned [16]. In particular, the racial surveys do not talk about Jews, but only about “Nordic”, “Dinaric”, “Alpine-Eastern” and other “Aryan” races. Speaking to an international audience, the Würzburg group, organised by the Nazi party’s Racial Political Office, drew a clear line between the hereditary-biological (erb-biologisch) surveys, based on family reconstitutions, on the one hand, and the racial inventories, relying on anthropometric measuring, on the other. The former had the concrete goal of helping in the selection of the fittest for the socio-racial renovation of the region. The latter, however, did not serve an immediate practical purpose, because the state of the art in racial science did not yet warrant attributing different degrees of achievement potential to the various “Aryan” races. “In the New Germany, everybody whose appearance fits into the big frame of Aryan races counts, in the first instance, as a compatriot of equal value (gleichwertiger Volksgenosse), whether he has a long or round crane, blue or brown eyes, is tall or small” (Schmidt-Kehl et al., 1936, 845-846). It was, however, on the agenda of future research to explore the connection between mental and physical characteristics. Professor Schmidt-Kehl believed he had made some progress with regard to this issue by linking school grades into his database. Unsurprisingly, the result was that, in his villages, the persons of the Nordic race were more gifted than others (Schmidt-Kehl, 1937, 192-193).

52Even if “Non-Aryans” hardly show up in family reconstitutions, there is clear evidence that, in the process of compilation, they were noticed and reported to political agencies, which were involved in measures of persecution. This is well documented in the case of the Berlin Protestant Parish Register Office (Kirchenbuchstelle Altberlin), established in 1935-1936 by pastor Karl Themel (1890-1973), in close contact with Dr Kurt Mayer and his Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung. The Kirchenbuchstelle assembled the registers of all the 43 parishes in Old Berlin and, with some 50 collaborators, transcribed all the entries on forms. Particular attention was paid to “special cases”, i.e. Jews, “coloured persons, gypsies (Zigeuner)” and Turks, even if only one of the parents belonged to the “alien race” (fremdstämmig). The Kirchenbuchstelle collected all these cases in a special file (Fremdstämmigenkartei), and sent duplicates to the Party and state agencies executing Nazi racial policy, such as the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung, SS Reichsführer Himmler and regional party leaders. In 1936-1937, Themel granted the request of the Berlin Chief of Police to share all the data on Jews’ baptisms with him; this was explicitly destined to implement the law denationalising Jews (Gailus, 2001; Gailus, 2008a).

53It is true that the Berlin Kirchenbuchstelle did not really produce family reconstitutions, but found it enough to sort all the forms into huge well-ordered files. For the big family reconstitution project Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes, however, the Klenck and Kopf manual prescribed exactly the same procedure concerning persons of “alien race”: entries in the parish register revealing an “impact of alien blood (Jews, negroes, gypsies)” were to be transcribed twice and marked in red; and the local collaborators had to send the duplicates to the superior district office (Klenck and Kopf, 1937, 20, cf. 52, 57). The Mecklenburg Genealogical Office (Sippenkanzlei) in Schwerin, which had started as an institution of the Protestant Church, but was attached to Dr Mayer’s Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung in 1936, followed these instructions. In transcribing parish registry entries and compiling family books, a special focus was brought on Jews’ baptisms. Every collaborator was obliged to report these cases immediately; in this way, a “Jews’ file” (Judenkartei) for the region of Mecklenburg was built (Wurm, 2008, esp. p. 62-63, 67-68). [17] The Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung, in turn, collected a comprehensive Fremdstämmigenkartei for Germany, which allowed to identify “Non-Aryans” and “mixed-bloods” (Mischlinge), regardless of their religion. Next to the registers of births, marriages and deaths from Jewish communities, the lists of Jews’ baptisms were a major source; and the Reichsstelle requested them from all parts of the Reich (Schulle, 2001, 223-230). [18]

54A study on a protagonist of family reconstitution in the Rhineland shows how this work was intertwined with political action. Dr Karl Wülfrath (1904-1981), who had studied history and on whom Bredt’s Volkskörperforschung had made a strong impression, was in charge of compiling a family book for a whole district, the Kreis Bergheim, since 1937. For this purpose, he recruited many paid and unpaid collaborators and established a working group, which was attached to Cologne University in 1939 and incorporated, as a genealogical institute, into the provincial administration in 1941 (Rheinisches Provinzialinstitut für Sippen- und Volkskörperforschung). Since 1941, it functioned as a regional Sippenamt. In addition, Wülfrath was appointed as manager of the regional Verein für bäuerliche Sippenkunde und bäuerliches Wappenwesen. In this position, he was responsible for organising and supervising the efforts for Dorfsippenbücher in the whole Rhineland. As a keen networker, Wülfrath closely cooperated with the regional Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party and the Consortium for Resettlement Planning (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Aussiedlerplanung), founded in 1940 for finding “genetically healthy and vital” peasants to be resettled in the East, for Germanising part of the occupied Polish territory. Wülfrath was convinced that village genealogies were an excellent base for selecting suitable families in his region, where most farms were deemed too small, due to partible inheritance. As part of the War Research Program, the Reichsnährstand in fact instructed him to speed up the genealogical inventory of the villages concerned. Moreover, the Rhenish Provincial Institute for Psychiatric-Neurological Heredity Research, competent, among other things, for expert opinions on sterilisation (Forsbach, 2006, 201-214), commissioned Wülfrath’s working group to do family reconstitutions for specific communities. Finally, Wülfrath expanded the Fremdstämmigenkartei, which the regional Nazi Party had handed over to his institute, exploiting all sources to which he had access. Since 1941, in the context of beginning deportations, the Nazi authorities were especially interested in detecting “mixed-bloods”. Here, the genealogies and family reconstitutions were most useful. Wülfrath reported the persons that he had identified as Jewish to the Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party (Klein, 2003; Schulle, 2001, 295-296).

55Thus, in several cases where archival research has been done, there is evidence that the collaborators of the family reconstitution project complied with the instruction and reported information on persons of “alien race” to the political authorities. After all, Die Ahnen des deutschen Volkes was a joint venture of several Nazi organisations. Moreover, some of the protagonists of racial and genealogical-demographic research were at the same time active as politico-administrative officers, like Bruno Kurt Schultz, professor of racial science in Berlin and Prague, chair of the working group Die bäuerliche Lebensgemeinschaft and editor of the serial that published Wülker’s and Kothe’s family reconstitution studies (see above). At the same time, he was one of the crucial persons in the SS Race and Settlement Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt), which prepared and began to organise the expulsion of millions of Czechs and Poles and the resettlement of Germans in their place. His call to the new chair for racial biology in Prague was related to the beginning “racial-biological inventory” of the whole Czech population, a racial muster aimed at sorting out who was apt to be Germanised and who should be expelled or put to fatal “special treatment”. Schultz not only gave scientific support to the huge enterprise, but also trained the racial experts for the examinations. In 1940-1941, he had already been a leading officer in racial screenings in Alsace-Lorraine and Styria, and, as a high-ranking expert, participated in preparing and organising racial selection in Poland, the Baltic countries and parts of the Soviet Union (Heinemann, 2003, 151-163, 273, 314-319, 367-368, 421, 634-635; Schnitzler, 2012, 193-200). To be sure, in these massive screenings during the war, there was no time for compiling thousands of family reconstitutions in the occupied territories. For the Germanisation policy, political reliability, descent up to the grandparents, and, as the SS insisted, racial classification of physical appearance were the main criteria (Heinemann, 2003, 260-303; Fahlbusch et al., 2017, 998-1006).

56For the selection of those Germans, however, worth to be settled in the occupied and annexed territories, full village genealogies were the only reliable basis, at least in the view of the managing director of the Ahnen des deutschen Volkes enterprise (Heidt, 1940, 46). In his Rhine district, Wülfrath strove to put this principle into practice. A family reconstitution study of the East Frisian village Moordorf, founded as a fen colony in the eighteenth century, served as a deterrent. Originally settled indiscriminately by whoever was willing to come, the “antisocial” part of the population had procreated most. Its inferior genetic value was visible in the form of alcoholism, petty criminality and a large proportion of communist voters in the Weimar Republic. There were even some opponents to the Nazi regime, who had to be sent to jail or concentration camps. Not by coincidence, it was the leader of the Nazi farmers’ organisation who had ordered this village monography to be done (Rechenbach, 1940; cf. Wojak, 1992).

Conclusion

57Paul-André Rosental has shown that the rise of historical demography, based on family reconstitution, in the 1950s was due to a specific configuration of scholarly disciplines and political interests (Rosental, 2003, 223-239). I argue that in Germany and Austria during the first half of the twentieth century, there was a configuration which was rather different in character, but equally conducive to family reconstitution and historical demography. Völkisch ideology and the rise of racial science were key factors. A boom of village genealogies, largely compiled according to uniform rules, and massively used for demographic analysis, emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s. The product of this German configuration, however, was hardly suitable for export, and not feasible to survive after the fall of Nazism.

58A question that may deserve further scrutiny is whether there was no link at all between the two phases and types of historical demography. Hannes Hyrenius did know German population studies, including one from the Tübingen group (Hyrenius, 1942, 320 cites Müller, 1939). Did the German phenomenon pass completely unnoticed in France?