George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (22 May 1890 – 17 June 1966) was a British anthropologist and eugenicist who was one of the wealthiest men in England in the interwar period.
He embraced anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism and became a supporter of Oswald Mosley, which led to him being interned by the British government for two years during the Second World War.
[2] He was a son of Alexander Edward Lane Fox-Pitt-Rivers (2 November 1855 – 19 August 1927) and his wife Alice Ruth Hermione, daughter of Lord Henry Thynne.
[14] With the ending of the war, Pitt-Rivers was in a deeply insecure mood as he noted that the world that existed before 1914 would not return, and that the United Kingdom was entering a new age.
In it he wrote "the Jews are the principal agents of economic and political misery in the world, through their dealings in international finance and their actions in promoting democracy and revolution".
He strongly disliked Australia, which he found to be too democratic for his tastes, and spent as much time as possible out of the country on field research in New Zealand, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and elsewhere in the South Pacific.
[6] Pitt-Rivers was described by the British historian Richard Griffins as being "obsessed" with racial questions which he believed to be the prime moving force in human history.
Within the Eugenics Society there was major debate between the followers of Marie Stopes who demanded unlimited birth control and an emphasis on female sexual pleasure for middle-class women, vs. those who found her approach too radical and likely to offend British public opinion.
[21] From 1931 to 1937, Pitt-Rivers held the positions of Secretary General and Treasurer of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, where he came into contact with German eugenicists Eugen Fischer and his assistant Lothar Loeffler.
In the 1935 general election, he ran for a seat in the House of Commons as an "Independent Agriculturist" with backing from the British Union of Fascists.
[22] Pitt-Rivers was enraged by the abdication crisis of 1936 and strongly supported the right of King Edward VIII to retain the throne and marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
[23] In September 1937, he attended the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg where he expressed "rabid anti-British views, preferably to German audiences".
[24] He visited Belgium to meet Léon Degrelle of the Rex fascist group, and Spain to proclaim his support for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
Fuller and Admiral Barry Domvile all made regular visits to Pitt-Rivers's Dorset estate at Hinton St.
[26] During the Phoney War in the winter of 1939–1940, he took part in the meetings of the various "patriotic" (i.e fascist) groups calling for a negotiated peace with Germany.
[24] Pitt-Rivers was held in Brixton Prison and Ascot internment centre (1940–1942) during the Second World War as a Mosleyite Nazi sympathiser under the Defence Regulation 18B.