 So with these measurements, the Germans were trying to prove, of course, that African skulls were smaller, which they were not. But it was an early example of the kind of bogus race science that formed the basis of the Nazi obsession with Aryan superiority. Less than three decades later, Jewish skulls and other body parts would also be measured in these same ways to prove their supposed inferiority. The lines of connection between these two chapters in the bloody history of eugenics were direct.