You say that means what?

I was curious when I saw a new book by an author named Helmut Schröcke, Die Vorgeschichte des deutschen Volkes: Indogermanen, Germanen, "Slawen" [Preshistory of the German People: Indogermanics, Germanics, "Slavs"] (2009). I was looking for information about a couple of historical points I had recently been discussing with someone. And this book had all the trappings of being a scholarly work. I hadn't planned to read all 700-plus pages of it. But I had hoped I could find some information that I was looking for in such an evidently thorough book on the subject.

I began to wonder about Schröcke's perspective when I read that that by 10,000 BCE "one of the greatest Darwinian selections" had taken place which transformed the people of part of the area that would later become Germany into the "blond, blue-eyed and white Mesolithic people." These genetic products were so smart and creative that until this day, according to Schröcke, they lead the world in IQ.

Uh-oh, I thought. This doesn't sound so good. But maybe he's swallowed some badly flawed conservative assumptions about IQ while still taking a sound scientific approach in other things.

Then he cites a dubious argument by the late Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz, who German and Austrian rightwingers admire because of his pro-Nazi work during the Third Reich and later arguments that lend themselves to racial theories. The Lorenz citation was in support of Schröcke's argument that "the further evolutionary development of humanity is hindered" by the intercultural mixing. Definitely not sounding good - and this is just the second page of the chapter I started reading.

He continues immediately to say, "Die Herkunft dieser Zerstörungkräfte läßt sich heute lokalisieren. Ihre Diskussion liegt außerhalb der Aufgaben diese Buches." ("The origin of these destructive forces can be localized today. Discussion of them lies outside the scope of this book.") Uh-oh again. And double uh-oh. Anyone who's encountered much of this kind of thing would begin to wonder if there's a theory about Jews or Freemasons at work here.

A couple of pages later as he describes ancient times in middle Europe, claims that the Germanic peoples - "Germanic" comes from the Roman name for the tribes in northern Europe - maintained strict tribal laws against intermarrying with non-Germanic peoples and therefore had no mixing with the Celts who lived for centuries south of them. More uh-oh.

I skimmed through the following chapter, in which I found the kicker:

Dies ist eine aureichende Begründung für einen "deutschen Sonderweg", für das Dasein des letzten bis 1945 weitgehend unvermischt geliebenen größten Volkes der Indogermamanen, das jetzt in der multiethnischen und multikulturellen EU und ihrer geplanten Weiterentwicklung seine "Endlösung" finden soll.

[This is sufficient ground for a "German special way", for the existence until 1945 of the last widely unmixed remaining large people of the Indogermanics, which now in the multiethnic and multicultural EU [European Union] and its planned wider development will find its "Final Solution."]

"Endlösung" is exactly the word used for the infamous "Final Solution" of the Third Reich, the attempt to kill off all the Jews of Europe. This is undoubtedly the language of far-right crackpots. Which tells me that it would be risky to take anything in his book as established fact without responsible documentation.

Bringfriede Sas did a post about him, Post von Helmut Schröcke Endstation Rechts Sachsen 11.06.2008, that describes various far-right connections of Schröcke's. He has been part of the xenophobic Heidelberger Kreis (Heidelberg Circle). Eberhard Seidel wrote in Volksfront aus CDU und Skins 20.03.2001taz about how Schröcke and other leading lights of the Heidelberger Kreis helped legitimate to a degree racist and xenophobic attitudes within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Tags: deutschland, germany, helmut schröcke