The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

5
Scientific Racism
in Service of the Reich
German Anthropologists in the Nazi Era
Gretchen E. Schafft
BACKGROUND
Almost sixty years after the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in World War II, an
old man stands shaking by his door, afraid to meet the anthropologists who have
come to talk to him. He says he does not have anything to tell; he was sick, in the
hospital at the time. Another villager is not hesitant and tells of the time of the Nazi
occupation of Poland when anthropologists came into the town under SS guard,
gave the townspeople a time to appear at the priest’s house, and examined them
from head to foot. (Few Jews remained in the villages by that time, having been
moved to collection points and ghettoes.) Some were given German passports and
told to appear for induction and transport to the Russian Front. Others were told
to appear for delousing and assignment to labor battalions in Germany. Others
escaped to the south and joined the resistance, or were shot attempting to do so.
The few people who can remember this time complete a record that at last is being
pieced together. They are the living memory of a period almost forgotten in
anthropology’s professional history.
The fact that German and, to a lesser extent, Austrian anthropologists were involved
in the Holocaust as perpetrators, from its beginning to its conclusion, has
never been fully acknowledged nor discussed by American anthropologists. 1 The
role that American funding played in developing the Nazi ideology of race has also
not been told. The information has been available, although not easy to access.
Records of these anthropologists’ theoretical and empirical studies, as well as their
activities as trainers of SS doctors, members of racial courts, collectors of data from
concentration camp medical experiments, and certifiers of racial identities have
been “cleansed.” Documents that should be available in archival files are missing.
The biographies of many perpetrators include a cover story for the years 1933
through 1945. 2 The archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported German
anthropologists in their racial research, are also mysteriously missing important
research plans and reports.
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