Hans F. K. Günther

Hans F. K. Günther
Hans F. K. Günther
Born	Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891-02-16)February 16, 1891 Freiburg, German Empire
Died	September 25, 1968(1968-09-25) (aged 77) Freiburg, West Germany
Nationality	German
Other names	Race Günther (Rassengünther) or Race Pope (Rassenpapst)
Education	Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, University of Vienna
Occupation	Professor
Employer	University of Jena, University of Berlin, University of Freiburg
Known for	Nazi Eugenics, Scientific racism
Home town	Freiburg
Political party	National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)

Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (February 16, 1891 – September 25, 1968) was a German race researcher and eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as Race Günther (Rassengünther) or Race Pope (Rassenpapst). He is considered to have been a major influence on National Socialist racialist thought. He taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg, writing numerous books and essays on racial theory. Günther's Short Ethnology of the German People (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. In the same year he 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 "The Knight, death and the devil: the heroic idea", a reworking of the tradition of German Pagan-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.