Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (16 February 1891 – 25 September 1968) was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

Günther taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg, writing numerous books and essays on racial theory.

Günther's Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Short Ethnology of the German People"), published in 1929, was a popular exposition of Nordicism.

He studied comparative linguistics at Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, but also attended lectures on zoology and geography.

He wrote a polemical work entitled Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Der heldische Gedanke ("The Knight, Death and the Devil: The Heroic Idea"), a reworking of the tradition of German völkisch-nationalist Romanticism into a form of "biological nationalism".

He received scientific awards from the University of Uppsala and the Swedish Institute for Race Biology, headed by Herman Lundborg.

[3][4] At the conference the obliteration of Jewish identity, or "people death" (Volkstod) of the Jews was discussed[citation needed].

Various proposals were made, including the "pauperization of European Jews and hard labor in massive camps in Poland"[citation needed].

After World War II, Günther was placed in French internment camps for three years until it was concluded that, though he was a part of the Nazi system, he was not an instigator of its criminal acts, making him less accountable for the consequences of his actions.

Another eugenics book was published in 1959 in which he argued that unintelligent people reproduce too numerously in Europe, and the only solution was state-sponsored family planning.

Eugen Fischer, the professor of anthropology in Freiburg, was an influential proponent of these ideas and had lectured at Albert Ludwigs University when Günther studied there.

He acknowledged that both the Germans and Jews were not "races" in the strictest sense of the word but thought that it would cause no harm to refer to the latter as such in non-scientific popular racial works.

Physical and mental differences, however, are very great, not only within Europe (often called the home of the 'white' or 'Caucasian' race) and within each of the countries in it, but even within some small district in one of the latter.

But now a fresh perplexity comes in: In Scotland are found many tall, fair, light-eyed men and women, speaking Keltic.

[14] Among Günther's disciples was Bruno Beger who, after the 1938–39 German expedition to Tibet, concluded that the Tibetan peoples had characteristics that placed them between the Nordic and Mongol races, uniquely among other East Asians.

[16] When newly appointed Thuringian Education Minister Wilhelm Frick, the first NSDAP minister in government, appointed Günther to a chair in "Social Anthropology" at the University of Jena in 1930 (for which Jena professors considered him unqualified), Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring demonstratively attended his inaugural lecture.