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FROM ANTHROPOLOGIE TO RASSENKUNDE IN THE GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITION ROBERT PROCTOR The main focus ofanthropological research must be on cultural traditions, rather than on racial descent. Recognition of this fact will save the world, and especially Germany, much difficulty. Franz Boas, speech delivered in Kiel, July 3D, 1931, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his receiving the doctorate (as reported in Koch 1985:121). In his 1946 history of Hitler's Professors, the Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People, Max Weinreich cites Justice Robert H. Jackson 's opening remarks before the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to the effect that "History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty." Weinreich then levels a charge that certainly must rank among the most serious ever posed against an anthropologist: There were in the memory of mankind Jenghiz Khans and Eugen Fischers but never before had a Jenghiz Khan joined hands with an Eugen Fischer. For this reason, the blow was deadly efficient. In 1939, there were 16,723,800 Jews in the world; 9,479,200 of them lived in Europe; of the latter, 7,950,000 belonged to Eastern Jewry. Six million Jews in Europe are no more. Thus, thirty-six per cent ofworld Jewry, sixty-four per cent ofEuropean Jewry, seventy-five per cent Robert Proctor is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research, where he is coordinator of the Program on Science, Technology, and Power. He is the author of Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and is currently at work on a theoretical treatise on the comparative political history and philosophy of science. 138 FROM ANTHROPOLOGIE TO RASSENKUNDE 139 of the Eastern-European Jewish group in Europe have been murdered by Germans , or by mercenaries on German order. Had the war lasted one year more, probably not a singleJew in Europe would have remained alive. Ifthe murdered be placed one behind the other in marching order, the column of skeletons would extend all the way from New York to San Francisco, and then all the way back from San Francisco to New York, and then again from New York to Chicago.... (1946:240-41) Universally acknowledged as Germany's premier anthropologist, Fischer had served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut rur Anthropologie, as head ofGermany's two leading anthropological societies, and as editor ofseveral of Germany's foremost anthropologi,cal journals. Recognized as the "founder of human genetics," he had also distinguished himself as the first anthropologist ever to serve as rector of the University of Berlin. But among anthropologists, Fischer was not alone in his support for the Nazi regime. Many (perhaps most) joined the Nazi Party; many joined the SS; many might be said to have "joined hands" with Jenghiz Khan. Why were anthropologists so willing to support the Nazis? In many respects , the politically charged anthropology championed by Fischer and many of his colleagues was the product of a series of larger shifts in the nature of anthropological inquiry in Germany in the early decades of the century. The study of external "otherness" had been largely forestalled by the dismantling of the German colonial system at Versailles, and to an increasing degree, anthropologists shifted the focus of their attention to the "internal other" (Gypsies , Jews), and the internal "us" (the indigenous races of Europe). In contrast to the "salvage" logic governing the anthropology of indirect imperial rule (Stocking 1982), anthropology in Germany came to be governed by a "therapeutic " logic of internal social management-a logic directed towards the rescue of the Germanic races from a host of perceived threats-enemies from "within," and enemies from "without." As anthropologists sought to cope with the causes and consequences of the upheavals ofthe early years ofthe century -war and revolution-the concept of race came to occupy a special, and today , disturbing, place in anthropological discourse. Combined with the new science of genetics, and harnessed to a political party willing to root out any and all forms ofsocial deviance, German anthropological science helped provide both the theoretical and the practical tools for the implementation of Nazi racial policies. The purpose of this essay is to trace certain elements in these transformations , concentrating especially on those aspects of the discipline which ultimately engaged the political energies of the Third Reich. The point I would like to argue is...

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