The Nazi eugenicist who visited Scottish Traveller children at their country school and camps

The report into the treatment of gypsy Travellers is still to be published by the Scottish Government

Children of gypsies and Travellers living in the north of Scotland were subjected to a study by a German eugenicist who worked for the Nazi regime, it has emerged.

Wolfgang Abel, professor of ethnology and anthropology at the former University of Berlin and a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi paramilitary wing, stayed in a caravan with his wife and researcher in the grounds of a primary school in Caithness during the summer of 1938 as he sought to further his now discredited theories on the racial characteristics of gypsy/Traveller communities across Europe.

Head and arm measurements, handprints and photographs of the children were taken at the school , which was close to a quarry where many families are known to have lived at the time.

Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly | contributed

By the time of Abel’s visit to Scotland, he was a member of the Nazi Party and part of the SS’s Race and Settlement Main Office, which sought to safeguard the racial purity of the paramilitary organisation and the Third Reich at large.

READ MORE: The forgotten cave dwellers of Scotland’s far north

He had also authored a report that led to the sterilisation in 1937 of more than 380 mixed-race African German and Vietnamese German children - dubbed the ‘Rhineland Bastards - who were born around 1921, when troops drawn from the French colonial empire occupied the Rhineland.

Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly, an academic researcher of Montrose who is from a Traveller family, made the discovery of Abel’s visit to Scotland, which was known by both the police, the-then Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the local education authority at the time.

Dr Tammi-Connelly has recently received an article written by Ina Baikie, the-then school teacher at the school, Weydale Primary, which outlines her unhappiness - and that of the families - at the arrival of Abel.

The Scottish Government has commissioned a report into the 'Tinker Experiment' and the legislation that sought to assimilate Gypsy/Traveller communities in Scotland into the mainstream. The report has yet to be published. Pictured are a travelling family near Pitlochry in 1958. PIC: TSPL. | TSPL

She said: “Weydale is a real rural parish. It was farm workers children who attended the school, but importantly there were gypsy Travellers living in the quarry at Weydale and they attended the school. It was those children that he was interested in.

“According to Ina’s article, she had obviously queried the visit and she had been told he had the permission of the education authority to be there.

“She wasn’t happy because she knew that they were taking photographs, taking measurements of their heads and their handprints, and she also states that the families weren’t happy that it was being done.”

Abel’s visit is mentioned in the original report commissioned by the Scottish Government into the legislative framework that led to the so-called Tinker’s Experiment, which sought to assimilate the gypsy Traveller community into mainstream society through decades of education, housing and welfare policy.

The report, which has been written by academics mainly from the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen, is yet to be published. It was originally submitted in September last year.

Dr Tammi-Connelly claimed she resigned from the academic scrutiny panel after the Scottish Government requested to reduce mention of Abel’s visit to Scotland to a footnote and redact references to “cultural genocide” in the paper. She has now leaked the original paper online.

“You expect edits coming back, but not to be told that huge chunks have to come out, because then it loses its strength and then it loses its context,” Dr Tammi-Connelly said.

The Scottish Government said the final report would be published in the next few months

Abel’s visit was documented in small media reports of the day and also in a report by Gordon Shannon, a former SSPCA inspector in the Highlands.

Wolfgang Abel, the eugenicist and member of the Nazi Party who also worked for the SS. He visited the children of Scottish Travellers in Caithness in 1958. PIC: Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem. | Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem.

Mr Shannon’s report, which is included in the original paper submitted to the Scottish Government, said: “One day the county police phoned me to say that a German professor, visiting Scotland, wanted information about Tinkers.

“They sent him to me. We met in the local museum. He produced his card, which bore the inscription: 'Wolfgang Abel: Professor of Anthropology, University of Berlin'. He said he would be very grateful if I could tell him where he might be able to meet gypsies, primitives and cave dwellers.

“As an anthropologist, he wanted to take certain head measurements - for scientific purposes. I could only think of the McPhees of Caithness, indicating from a map their most likely abodes and if in doubt to consult the police in Wick or Thurso.”

Dr Tammi-Connelly said further research of the records of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, part of the former Berlin University, found reference to Abel’s visit to Scotland in 1938. A return visit was planned for the following year, which never occurred due to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Dr Tammi-Connelly said: “The countries he was focusing on at that key point in time was Scotland and Romania and so they are both mentioned in the records. It is also known that he travelled to Norway after he left Scotland.”

Weydale near Thurso in Caithness, where Wolfgang Abel stayed in a caravan in the school grounds. PIC: geograph.org | geograph.org

She said she believed the information gathered in Caithness was part of Abel’s plan to have a Europe-wide datatebase of gypsies and Travellers.

“He definitely had a huge interest in gypsies and Travellers and then we know from letters about this database about race and his views on what was acceptable and what wasn’t,” she said.

“This is why he had been in Scotland. This is why he had been in Romania and this is why he was heading over to Norway after he had been in Caithness. I think the database would have been used for the eradication of gypsy Travellers.

“The Nazis were convinced that the Reich was going to be Europe-wide and they were so intent on cleansing , and that included the cleansing of gypsies and Travellers.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “We commissioned this independent research in 2023 to better understand the impact past policies had on our gypsy/Traveller communities. We are committed to learning important lessons from the ‘Tinker Experiment’ to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.

“The final version of the report will be published in the next few months. The version that has appeared online is an earlier draft.”