Karin Magnussen
| Karin Magnussen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 February 1908 Bremen, German Empire |
| Died | 19 February 1997 (aged 89) Bremen, Germany |
| Parent(s) | Walter Magnussen |
Karin Magnussen (9 February 1908 – 19 February 1997) was a German biologist, teacher and researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics during the Third Reich. She is known for her 1936 publication "Race and Population Policy Tools", and her studies of heterochromia iridis (different-colored eyes) using iris specimens, supplied by Josef Mengele, from Auschwitz concentration camp victims.
Karin Magnussen, daughter of the landscape painter and ceramist Walter Magnussen, grew up with her sister in a middle-class home. She completed her schooling in Bremen, graduating with a degree. She then studied biology, geology, chemistry and physics at the University of Göttingen. Magnussen joined the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB) while she was still an undergraduate in college. By 1931, at the age of 23 years, she was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Later, she became a leader of the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM) and a member of the National Socialist Teachers League. As a BDM leader, she held lectures on the politics of race and population. She graduated in 1932 with an examination in the subjects of botany, zoology and geology. In July 1932, her thesis was accepted: Studies on the physiology of the butterfly wing.
After receiving her doctorate, she studied at the Zoological Institute of the University of Göttingen in Alfred Kühn. She placed first and later second on her state exam for a high school teaching position; inter alia in biology in 1936. In Hanover, Magnussen was employed as a teacher at a secondary school. Magnussen possibly modeled herself after "...the biologist Agnes Bluhm, who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fur Biologie and wrote "Die rassenhygienischen Aufgaben des weiblichen Arztes", Berlin, 1934, and who unhesitatingly supported Hitler's regime." In 1935, Magnussen went to work in the Nazi Racial Policy Office in the District of Hanover. A year later, she wrote Race and Population Policy Tools.
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