Otto Carl Reche (24 May 1879 – 23 March 1966) was a German anthropologist and professor fromGlatz (Kłodzko),Prussian Silesia. He was active in researching whether there was a correlation betweenblood types andrace. During the Second World War he openly advocated the genocide of ethnic Poles. Once a member of theNazi Party, he remained active in anthropological issues following the downfall ofNazi Germany.
Reche was educated at the University of Breslau (now theUniversity of Wrocław), theUniversity of Jena and theUniversity of Berlin.[1]
In his career, Reche served as the director of the Departments of Anthropology at theUniversity of Vienna and then theUniversity of Leipzig,[1] and also taught at theUniversity of Hamburg. Among the organizations he was involved in were theNazi Party and theGerman Society for Blood Group Research (which he founded along withPaul Steffan). In 1928, Reche and Steffan foundedZeitschrift für Rassenphysiologie, a magazine on the subject.[2]
Reche's work with blood types, involving studies in northwestern Germany, was an attempt to prove a correlation between which blood type a person had and whether they were of German ancestry. He claimed that the three blood types,A, B, and O, were each originally attached to European, Asian, and Native American races, but that interracial marriage had diluted this over the centuries.[2]
Reche justified theinvasion of Poland in 1939 in a letter toAlbert Brackmann arguing:
we needRaum but no Polish lice on our fur. I am absolutely of the opinion that the racial-scientific side is determinative in the solution of all these questions since we do not want to build a German people in the East in the future that would only be a linguistically germanised, racial mish-mash, with strong asiatic elements, and Polish in character. That would be no GermanVolk, nor a cornerstone for a German future!...Since I also know the anthropological conditions in Poland and know what is racially and hereditarily useful in this people and what at all events is to be driven out of the German settlement area, I believe I have gathered together in the course of many years several ideas which should now be used for the general good and for our future.[3]
During theSecond World War Reche became director of Institute for Racial and Ethnic Sciences in Lipsk. In this position he wrote about ethnic Poles, claiming that they are an "unfortunate mixture" consisting among others of Slavs, Balts and Mongolians and that they should beeliminated to avoid possible mixing with theGerman race.[4]
On April 16, 1945, Reche was arrested by American forces for membership in the Nazi Party, but released after sixteen months of detainment.[1]
In 1959, Reche was chosen by a German court investigating the claims ofAnna Anderson that she wasAnastasia Nikolaevna, a Russian Grand Duchess thought to have been murdered along with the rest of the royal family. He concluded that Anna Anderson was either the Grand Duchess herself or an identical twin.[5] After Anderson's death, however, it wasconcluded based onDNA evidence that she was not Anastasia.
Reche died nearHamburg in 1966.[1]
