The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

128 essentializing difference
outcome of these ethnographic and anthropomorphic investigations was a sorting
of people for slave labor, colonization of Ukrainian farmland, entry into the German
Army, or death.
The German anthropologists were not satisfied with the descriptions of populations
they could obtain from Polish scientists: “There is little worth in the materials
presented to us by Polish anthropologists due to their peculiar point of view
and the methods used. There is virtually no material on the races and their distribution;
everything remains for the German scientists to do.” 27
Many of the anthropological positions were filled with university people from
Vienna. Women anthropologists played a major role in the section, one becoming
acting director when her predecessor was called to the front. Their duties were
broad and strenuous, and the anthropologists, without a doubt, worked very hard.
In Cracow they took part in the confiscation of libraries and private collections
of books useful to their cause. They oversaw the inventory of ethnographic museums
throughout Poland and arranged for materials to be sent back to Germany for
exhibits there; they also prepared exhibits for display in occupied Poland. A major
thrust of these exhibits seemed to be the justification for the Nazi invasion. These
justifications included the idea that Germanic tribes and peoples had populated the
newly occupied lands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and their “racial” heritage
had provided every cultural advantage to the GG. This heritage needed to
be redefined and protected in the future. They published unceasingly in journals,
paid for by the IDO, devoted to examination of the discoveries of Eastern Europe,
particularly the GG. They coordinated visits with anthropologists from the
Reich and parceled out work to them.
Their most important task, however, was the ethnographic and anthropometric
studies of the people of occupied Poland. During the four years of their IDO
work, they investigated numerous villages, delousing centers, at least one ghetto,
and concentration/prisoner-of-war camps. This ethnographic work was carried on
in coordination with the SS, which provided protection to the scientists and ensured
the compliance of the subjects. People were taken at gunpoint to collection places
where they were measured, interviewed, and sometimes fingerprinted. Occasionally,
hair samples were taken. Photographs were taken by SS photographers, and
sketches of body hair were made of many of the subjects. 28
In 1942 the section reported that it had made 13,258 separate notes in its research
into Polish bibliographic sources! Many of these were historical descriptions of settlements
in which the anthropologists had an interest. They had assembled these notes
and placed them in a card catalog that was “completed up to the letter ‘J.’ ” 29
The Section on Jewish Research described its goal in a forthright way. The staff
collected written material about Jews and hoped to publish materials showing the
results of the “racial mixing” of societies in the occupied lands. “The final goal of
all the individual research projects is the production of a history and course of study
of the Jewish question in order to immunize the coming generations against renewed
domination tendencies of Jews.” 30