Houston Stewart Chamberlain

British-German racial theorist and son-in-law of Richard Wagner — whose Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was the most influential elaboration of Aryan racial theory before Nazism.

Aryan racial history: Chamberlain's Foundations reinterprets all of Western history as the story of Aryan (Germanic) versus Semitic influence — attributing all creative achievement to the Aryan race and identifying the Jews as its primary adversary. He argued that Jesus was probably Aryan (not Jewish) and that Germanic spirituality, rather than Roman Christianity, was the authentic inheritance of the West. The book was enormously popular — Kaiser Wilhelm II read it repeatedly, Hitler met Chamberlain and called him a prophet, and it became the primary text of systematic racial ideology before Mein Kampf. Chamberlain was the intellectual bridge between late-19th century racial science and 20th century Nazism.