---
title: "Francisc Rainer"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisc_Rainer"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:18.807273+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

With his activity in academia, Rainer reacted against cronyism, taking a public stand against arbitrary appointments in teaching, and ruining his relationship with the establishment. At a time when the Romanian school of anthropology was being divided between centrists and supporters of the fascist Iron Guard, he was again confronted by the far-right. Rainer was opposed to the fascist youth, whose members instigated in favor of academic censorship in his university curriculum. At one such incident in early 1938, Rainer stood unmoved at his desk as some of his fascist students, including the son of painter Nicolae Tonitza, lit firecrackers and threw eggs in his direction. However, he refused to ask for sanctions against them, and eventually received their letter of apology.
After 1939, although Romania was formally aligned with Nazi Germany, Rainer spoke out against Nazi racial science. In his public lectures, he dismissed the Nazi claim that cephalic indexes were good predictors of intelligence. His publicized texts, deemed "courageous" by historian Adrian Majuru, accepted the idea of race, but denied the concept of a "pure race", rejected the scientific claims of Aryanism, and argued that European civilization owed its existence to Semitic peoples. According to Rainer, races were rather phenotypical isolates of only one species, the homo sapiens recens, of the same genetic age; there existed no racial hierarchy.
In 1940, at the height of World War II, Rainer helped establish an anthropological research center of which he was honorary director until his death. That year, he and his institution were admitted into the French Prehistoric Society. In 1941, following Romania's entry, alongside Germany, in the war against the Soviet Union, Rainer obtained that his team of doctors be spared conscription.
Later that year, Rainer retired from teaching, having reached the age limit. The students demanded and obtained that he be allowed to hold additional lectures in general and human biology, despite Rainer's problematic deafness. Meanwhile, G. T. Popa, who had continued Rainer's anatomical work in Iași between 1928 and 1942, took over his chair in Bucharest. Tensions between Popa and his mentor were already showing in public, with Popa fending off accusations that he had taken credit for Rainer's work on the hypophyseal portal system.
In May 1943, Rainer was made an honorary member of the Romanian Academy. He continued to publish anthropological contributions, including a 1942 description (with Ion Th. Simionescu as the co-author) of the Cioclovina Skull, the first such paleolithic discovery on Romanian soil. He also contributed a chapter on "the living substance" to Victor Vâlcovici's 1943 synthesis, Materia și viața ("Matter and Life"). He was still an outspoken adversary of the Nazi regime. Maintaining a philosophical correspondence with the medievalist Alphonse Dupront, who was stranded in occupied France, he described the Nazi age as an "empire of suffering", reaffirming his conviction in "the future of mankind". He was among the signers of a letter of protest, addressed to dictator Ion Antonescu, which questioned Romania's participation in the anti-Soviet war.
During the same months, Rainer diagnosed himself with lung cancer, which was another probable effect of his long exposure to formaldehyde fumes. He tried to hide this from his wife and his friends, claiming his problem was a mere case of paresis. His house was narrowly missed by the April 1944 bombardment, and he had to move into the house of a former assistant, Ion Țurai. He was later moved to Hospital No. 303, where he developed metastasis in the brain.
Rainer asked to be relocated to his townhouse, where he died on the morning of August 4, 1944. He had predicted the exact time of his death, and written precise instructions for his body's embalming. This occurred just nineteen days before the Palace Coup that ended Romania's alliance with the Axis powers. With the onset of Soviet occupation, Rainer's left-wing stances were highlighted in his official commemoration. Brătescu, who was also a Communist Youth militant, published such homages in the newspaper Tribuna Poporului, and spoke about Rainer at the Students' Society. In the latter address, he emphasized that Rainer had been an antifascist and a reader of political works by Joseph Stalin.