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Houston Chamberlain, Bitter Foe of Jews and British Renegade, Dies

January 11, 1927
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(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Germanized Englishman, theoretician and advocate of racial anti-Semitism, died in Baireuth, Bavaria, on Sunday at the age of 71.

Chamberlain, who was the scion of a distinguished English family, exercised a great influence in the German anti-Semitic movement. He was encouraged and often quoted by ex-kaiser Wilhelm, in his glorification of the German race and his putting forward the theory of the superiority of the Nordics and the inferiority of the Semites. The renegade Englishman inflamed Germans to anti-Semitism in his book, “Grundlagen des Neuntzchnten Jahrhunderts” published in 1899. This book found wide circulation and his admirers declared him to be the greatest German figure since Kant and Schopenhauer.

On the outbreak of the war, Chamberlain espoused with enthusiasm the cause of his country’s enemies, and in April 1915, it was announced that he had received the Iron Cross. He was the son-in-law of Richard Waguer.

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