Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (/ˈtʃeɪmbərlɪn/; 9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was a British-German-French philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, scientific racism, and Nordicism; he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), published 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. In the early 1920s, Chamberlain met and encouraged Adolf Hitler: he has been referred to as "Hitler's John the Baptist".

Born in Hampshire, in 1884 he settled in Paris, and was later naturalised as a French citizen. He emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of an adoration for composer Richard Wagner. He married Eva von Bülow, Wagner's daughter, in December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death. During World War I, Chamberlain sided with Germany against his country of birth. He took German citizenship in 1916.