ABSTRACT
If one surveys the origins of the Volkish movement in Germany during the three or four decades prior to the First World War it is apparent that Haeckel played an influential, significant, indeed a decisive role in its genesis and subsequent development. One of the most influential authors in the field of racial anthropology and eugenics was the physician Ludwig Woltmann, who has been described as the 'most important representative of the Gobineau theory of the Nordic race' in Germany at the turn of the century. Even closer than Woltmann to Ernst Haeckel's social theories was Otto Ammon, another leading social Darwinist and racial anthropologist. With a triumph of evolutionary Monism, he contended, religion and philosophy would no longer be in mutual contradiction. In another eulogy written for Haeckel's Centenary, the noted biologist and anthropologist, Professor Gerhard Heberer also claimed Haeckel as a prophet of National Socialism.
