Respected wartime scholars fabricated absurd racial pseudoscience against enemies

Evidence

Both were scholars of good standing, writing during World War I. The German historian of art, Josef Strzygowski, in his Altai, Iran und Völkerwanderung (Leipzig, 1917) discovered the Nordic race to be composed of Germans, Ukrainians, Armenians, Persians, Hungarians, Bulgars and Turks (pp. 306–307). The Society of Medicine of Paris not only published a report on the discovery of “polychesia” (excessive defecation) and “bromidrosis” (body odor) in the German race, but proposed urinalysis for the detection of German spies; German urine was “found” to contain 20 per cent non-uric nitrogen as against 15 per cent for other races. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2242

Categorization

• CANDY: The Paris Society of Medicine proposing urinalysis to detect German spies is a darkly hilarious absurdity — great cocktail-party material for anyone interested in the history of pseudoscience.
• SEED: Angle: how nationalist wartime passions corrupt scientific standards — the urinalysis-for-spies episode as a case study in motivated reasoning wearing a lab coat.