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Extreme racist opinion in Germany, exemplified by Theodor Fritsch, asserted that Jews were a negroid mix. This continued in the works of, for instance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Each individual Jew, according to John Beddoe, the pigmentation expert, contained the negroid and Asiatic type. The Jew was a chameleon in this respect. Rudolf Virchow conducted a research project in which skin color was presented not as an objective fact but rather as something to be intuitively felt. The general consensus, even among Jews, was that Jews were dark, yet the research showed the contrary. Jews in the liberal arts and poetry of the Weimar period often constructed Jews as dark or black, as in the work of George Grosz. The Swiss-French race theorist and anti-Semite George-Alexis Montandon perceived the Jews as an ancient cross of Asiatic and negro and expressed this in his famous exhibition, “How to recognize a Jew.” The fear of cross-breeding became more intense in the Nazi period, along with sexual fear of blacks and Jews. Hitler attacked the “black disgrace” on the Rhine that was leading to a Jewish-inspired Vernegerung and would eventually produce in Germany something like the negrified French state to the south. Nazi polemical and propaganda literature habitually portrayed the Jews as black or dark. Nazis borrowed from American anti-black legislation. Fascist Italy had a similar fear of racial pollution by Jews and blacks, as can be seen in countless cartoons and illustrations in La Difesa della Razza. Cultural pollution by Jews and negroes was equally feared.

German science in early twentieth century was sophisticated, and Nazi theorists had to pay it lip service as they constructed their racial empire. Definitions of key terms like blood or race were never arrived at. Who or what was a Jew? Hans F. K. Günther and other Nazi race theorists were poorly trained and vague. The same was true of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most influential race ideologues of the Nazi Party. Their works were taken seriously by Nazi bureaucracy. Throughout the Reich, race theorists helped the bureaucracy. George-Alexis Montandon, the Swiss-born, naturalized French physician and polygenist anthropologist, selected Jews in France for deportation using utterly dubious criteria. Exhibitions on race and centers of study were set up to promote Nazi race policies. Relatively little new physical anthropological research was conducted on Jews because it would have undermined the basis of racial laws. Attempts were made to see if Jewish blood was different. Non-somatic research into Jewish difference was carried out by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Nazi Jewish studies had to engage with the black Jews who had troubled polygenists.

This chapter examines how the notion of population transfer emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the retreat and then collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of competing ethnolinguistic nationalisms in south-eastern Europe. The writings of the earliest proponents of population transfer (Lichtenstädter; Montandon) are examined, as are the initial attempts at an interstate level to ‘de-balkanize the Balkans’ through population exchange on the eve of the First World War. At the centre of the early history of population transfer is the liberal Greek prime minister and nation builder, Eleftherios Venizelos, the first of a series of leaders from small states whose international reputation helped legitimize these ‘fantasies of ethnic unmixing’. The reception of his plans for so-called ‘reciprocal emigration’ treaties illustrates how from the outset attitudes towards population transfer became bound up with the persons invoking the measure and the state and cause they represented.