Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) shows the German cartographer Heinrich Kiepert as an example of the Alpine type.

The Alpine race is a historical race concept defined by some late 19th-century and early 20th-century anthropologists as one of the three sub-races of the Caucasian race,^[1][2][3] the other two being Nordic and Mediterranean. The Alpine race was identified as descending from the Celts residing in central Europe in Neolithic times.^[4]

History [edit]

Duce Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany in June 1940. Hitler identified Mussolini as part of the Alpine race.

The term "Alpine" (H. Alpinus) has historically been given to denote a physical type within the Caucasian race, first defined by William Z. Ripley (1899), but originally proposed by Vacher de Lapouge. It is equivalent^{[dubious – discuss]} to Joseph Deniker's "Occidental" or "Cevenole" subrace.^[5][6] In the early 20th century the Alpine physical type was popularised by numerous anthropologists, such as Thomas Griffith Taylor and Madison Grant, as well as in Soviet era anthropology.^[7][8]

The German Nazi Party under the influence direction of Hans F. K. Günther, recognized the Germans as including five Aryan racial subtypes, described by Günther in his work Klein Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1929): Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, East Baltic, and Dinaric, viewing Nordics as being at the top of the racial hierarchy.^[9] He defined each racial subtype according to general physical appearance and their psychological qualities including their "racial soul" - referring to their emotional traits and religious beliefs, and provided detailed information on their hair, eye, and skin colours, facial structure.^[10] He provided photographs of Germans identified as Nordic in places like Bedan, Stuttgart, Salzburg, and Schwaben; and provided photographs of Germans he identified as Nordic and Mediterranean types, especially in Bavaria and the Black Forest region of Baden.^[11] Hitler was so impressed by this work by Günther, that he made it the basis of his eugenics policy.^[12]

Adolf Hitler utilized the term Alpine to refer to a type of the Aryan race, and in an interview spoke admirably about his idol Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, commending Mussolini's Alpine racial heritage saying:

They know that Benito Mussolini is constructing a colossal empire which will put the Roman Empire in the shade. We shall put up ... for his victories. Mussolini is a typical representative of our Alpine race...

—Adolf Hitler, 1931.^[13]

It however fell out of popularity by the 1950s, but reappeared in the literature of Sonia Mary Cole (1963) and Carleton Coon (1969).^[14] In more recent sources, a very small array of anthropologists accustomed with such usage, still use the term.^[15]

Physical Appearance [edit]

The Alpine race is mainly distinguished by its cranial measurements, such as high cephalic index. A typical Alpine skull is therefore regarded as brachycephalic ('broad-headed').^[16] As well as being broad in the crania, this thickness appears generally elsewhere in the morphology of the Alpine, as Hans Günther describes:

...the Alpine race is thick-set and broad. The average height of the Alpine man is about 1.63 metres. This small height is brought about by the relatively short, squat legs. This broadness and shortness is repeated in all the details: in the broadness of the hand and its short fingers, in the short, broad feet, in the thick, short calves.

Ripley (1899) further notes that the nose of the Alpine is more broad (mesorrhine) while their hair is usually a chestnut colour. According to Robert Bennett Bean (1932) the skin pigmentation of the Alpine is an 'intermediate white', a colour in-between the lighter skinned Nordic and the darker skinned Mediterranean.^[17] Despite the large numbers of alleged Alpines, the characteristics of the Alpines were not as widely discussed as those of the Nordics and Mediterraneans. Typically they were portrayed as "sedentary": solid peasant stock, the reliable backbone of the European population, but not outstanding for qualities of leadership or creativity. Madison Grant, insisted on their "essentially peasant character".^[18]

Geography and Origin [edit]

Madison Grant's map, from 1916, charting the distribution of the European races. Nordic race is shown in bright red; green indicates the Alpine race; yellow, the Mediterranean race.

According to Ripley and Coon, the Alpine race is predominant in central/southern/Eastern Europe and parts of Western/Central Asia. Ripley argued that the Alpines had originated in Asia, and had spread westwards along with the emergence and expansion of agriculture, which they established in Europe. By migrating into central Europe, they had separated the northern and southern branches of the earlier European stock, creating the conditions for the separate evolution of Nordics and Mediterraneans. This model was repeated in Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race (1916), in which the Alpines were portrayed as the most populous of European and western Asian races. However in Carleton Coon's rewrite of Ripley's The Races of Europe, he developed a different argument that they reduced the Upper Paleolithic survivors indigenous to Europe, based on prehistoric broad-headed crania unearthed at Grenelle (France) and the findings at Furfooz in the Belgian province of Namur:

...Alpine: A reduced and somewhat foetalized survivor of the Upper Palaeolithic population in Late Pleistocene France, highly brachycephalized; seems to represent in a large measure the bearer of the brachycephalic factor in Crô-Magnon. Close approximations to this type appear also in the Balkans and in the highlands of western and central Asia, suggesting that its ancestral prototype was widespread in Late Pleistocene times. In modern races it sometimes appears in a relatively pure form, sometimes as an element in mixed brachycephalic populations of multiple origin. It may have served in both Pleistocene and modern times as a bearer of the tendency toward brachycephalization into various population.

Coon further argued that they were linked to their unreduced (Brünn, Borreby) counterparts.

A debate concerning the origin of the Alpine race in Europe, involving Arthur Keith, John Myres and Alfred Cort Haddon was published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1906.^[19]

Despite the large numbers of this alleged race, the characteristics of the Alpines were not as widely discussed and disputed as those of the Nordics and Mediterraneans. Typically they were portrayed as "sedentary": solid peasant stock, the reliable backbone of the European population, but not outstanding for qualities of leadership or creativity. Madison Grant, insisted on their "essentially peasant character".^[20]

European Racial Types (Ripley) [edit]

See also [edit]

• Nordic race
• Mediterranean race
• Dinaric race

References [edit]

Further reading [edit]

• Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press. ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6. Lay summary (29 September 2010).