The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

scientific racism in the reich 131
Others were motivated to continue their work by their own success. Never had
their discipline been so well respected and received (Mosen 1991:9). Never had practitioners
been so busy. Furthermore, their work, which was so closely tied to the SS,
could provide exemptions from military service for the men. This was not a small
consideration. All the motivation for cooperation with the Nazi regime was incorporated
in career advancement, while the price for not cooperating was “internal
exile,” joblessness, or incarceration.
The academic discipline as a whole assisted the individual in handling the psychosocial
dissonance by allowing anthropologists the opportunity to publish their
research accounts with only vague references to their methods and selection of subjects.
A cognitive dissociation between the treatment of human subjects and the
descriptions of scientific research was actually encouraged. Despite the ruthlessness
of the actions instigated by anthropologists and other scientists, the incipient
shame and guilt they must have felt can be read into what they did not say and write.
It takes a great deal of reading to find even hints of “smoking guns” among the
remaining documents. For example, Mengele’s files, once returned to the KWI, are
not to be found. Only his victims indicate the enormity of his crime.
The practice of not specifying the actual activities undertaken in the name of
science served the purpose of protecting the postwar careers of Nazi anthropologists
and other perpetrators. Of the academics who worked in the IDO, virtually
all went on to other esteemed positions following the war. Fischer retired in 1942
from the KWI, but Verschuer, after paying a small fine, was given other university
positions until his connection with Mengele became known. Among the scientists
of the IDO, most continued with government careers despite their participation
in the genocide of Jews and Roma, as well as the rape of Poland.
Perhaps the anthropologists who witnessed genocide, and played a role in it,
buffered their knowledge of their own involvement with a scientism that went beyond
their convoluted verbiage. Perhaps they believed that the ethnographic studies
they performed were valuable in their own right, even if they had to be conducted
under SS guard and village people were shot at the edge of town during
their research trips.
Some of their values matched those of the outside world. They spoke of better
public health, better economic conditions, and a deeper intellectual understanding
of diversity. By stressing those values and denying the enormity of the
damage they were inflicting on people through their practice, the anthropologists
could continue to feel they were making a contribution to a better world,
one in which they would be ever more highly valued and their knowledge
revered. This could happen only if the fate of those they defined as “Other” was
justified by the search for a clean and purified “Folks’ Society.” Nazi anthropologists
marched under their pseudo-science banner to the tune of health, cleanliness,
and racial homogeneity, providing the state its justification for genocidal
and criminal acts. The activities of the Nazi anthropologists linger with us
through the suffering of survivors and often survivors’ offspring, through their