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  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  through .2 The archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported German anthropologists in their racial research, are also mysteriously missing important research plans and reports. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this obscuration is that the perpetrators themselves were careful in how they described their activities, making the most obscene appear quite harmless.3 They rarely stated explicitly what they were doing , and usually used euphemisms to describe what we now know were crimes against humanity. However, dedicated researchers have found enough corollary documentation to make an airtight case that anthropologists were deeply enmeshed in the crimes of the Third Reich. This documentation is found in archives in the United States and Europe and, increasingly, in books about and compilations of documents from the period (Lifton ; Proctor ; Klee et al. ; Drechsel ; Aly et al. ; Friedlander ; Klee ). The arguments against bringing up this disastrous chapter of the discipline’s history are strong. Anthropologists have asked: Why discredit our field so long after the deeds were done? Why discredit all anthropologists of the era when only a few were involved? Why should we give German anthropologists of that period so much attention when American anthropologists never took them seriously anyway? The answer to these questions is simply that the issues that challenged the anthropologists of the Nazi era were not so different from the issues that have challenged anthropologists at other times as well. As a discipline we have had a strong desire to play a role in the governmental activities of our countries and to inform policy makers of our learned opinions regarding population groups. Anthropologists were involved in the administration of England’s colonies; they have been involved in the conduct of war and have been advisers on racial and educational policy in the United States. This involvement has had both positive and negative effects on the people who were subject to the policies that evolved with anthropological input. Problems arise when the direction a government is taking is in opposition to the human rights of some of its people or those it has power to command. Does the anthropologist then abandon the desire to be a player, or does he or she adapt to the order of the day? We must remind our critics that one does not discredit a discipline by looking closely at the mistakes, or crimes, its theoreticians and practitioners have committed , even when they are of the magnitude of a Holocaust. It is far more dangerous...

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