In the late eighteenth century, any attempt to categorize humankind by race was necessarily tied to the controversy surrounding slavery as well as to the debate about the general perfectibility of humankind, which, in turn, focused on the potential of “primative” peoples to achieve higher (European) levels of civilization. The widespread glorification of the Pacific Islanders as unspoiled childern of nature in the wake of Rousseau's idealization of a natural state and Bougainville's La Nouvelle Cythère made the debate even more complex; the enthusiastic reception of these texts in Europe bespoke an alienation from a polarized society and a dissatisfaction with rapid technological advances. Meanwhile, scientists were striving to avoid such rhetoric by attempting to define anthropology as a science, to collect data, and to categorize humankind free of political bias and the limitations of any particular philosophy of history.

“You anti-Christian animal, what have you stung? I crush you, I the Lord crush you as you sit on My chair which you exalt up to the stars. I want to kick you into the deepest hell; now you are there and do not know what happened to you. On you, on you shall my soul take revenge; you God of the heathen who pray to you, who pray to you.” Thus began the letter dictated by Anna Margaretha Jahn and addressed to her confessor, Johann Christoph Wurtzler, pastor of the Moritz Church in Halberstadt, who had died three days earlier on 19 December 1692. The letter, transcribed by two men as Jahn spoke, closed with the commandment from God that the writing be delivered to Wurtzler's house and read aloud to his corpse, at which point he would become alive again, if that had not occurred already.

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.