Genocides demand discipline and disciplines. The Holocaust is a prime example of the academisation of genocide.
In his 1933 speech at the Nuremberg Nazi party convention, Adolf Hitler employed a creolized language of anthropology, politics and science:
National socialism professes… the heroic teaching of evaluating blood, race, and personality as well as the eternal laws of selection and thus consciously puts itself in unbridgeable contradiction to the philosophy of pacifist international democracy and its effects.
In exact fulfilment of this statement, the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene was set up by the Frankfurt University and the term ‘political biology’ began to gain currency. There was, as the academic face of the genocidal regime, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics.
Incidentally, March 1941 saw the organisation of a massive conference at Frankfurt which included the functions and outputs of the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in its agenda. Among the scholarly papers presented were: Dr. Wilhelm Grau’s ‘Attempts to Solve the Jewish Question in Past History,’ Dr. Peter-Heinz Seraphim’s ‘Problems of Economic and Population Policies Regarding a Universal European Solution of the Jewish Question,’ Dr. Walter Gross’s ‘The Racial Political Premises of Solving the Jewish Question’.
Seraphim’s paper, ostensibly addressing the ‘problem’ of Jewish populations, endorsed the creation of ghettos and total surveillance. In the paper, he examined the spatial and economic organisation of the ghettos, including supply lines for food and fuel, housing, office-spaces and of course the threat of diseases from overcrowding and poor hygiene. In short, Seraphim provided a blue print, through a scholarly analysis, for an effective ghetto. Gross argued that:
the physical and mental psychical characteristics of human groups are in disposition… of a hereditary nature… A race is a group of people who by common possession of hereditary dispositions of physical as well as of mental psychical kind differ from other human groups.
That the Nazis reworked textbooks, curricula and pedagogy to instill not just love for the Fatherland and the Fuhrer but also hatred for all those the party wanted excluded from citizenship is now beyond doubt. Teachers, researchers from multiple disciplines, educational administrators, were all Nazified. (By 1937, 97% of the teachers were members of the Nazi Party.)
The Nazi state, seeking total control, was not content with merely censoring popular culture and the organisation of taste. It set about transforming numerous disciplines into instruments of hate mobilisation, genocidal campaign and the war effort.
Theory enabled practice, in other words.
The League of German Girls taught courses such as ‘People and its Inheritance of Blood’ which included the topics ‘Racial Policies in the Third Reich,’ ‘Law for the Preservation and Assistance of Families with Many Children,’ and others. For such courses to have a semblance of authority, for the myths of racial superiority to sound convincing, the Nazis needed academic support that was theoretical and what could pass off as suitably scientific.
In 1946, Max Weinreich published from the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) a deeply disturbing study, “Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People”. Early in this magisterial work, Weinreich writes:
[there is] ample evidence that there was participation of German scholarship in every single phase of the crime. The ideas underlying the ultimate “action” were developed in advance with the necessary philosophical and literary trimmings, with historical reasoning, with maps and charts providing for the details with wellknown German thoroughness. Many fields of learning, different ones at different times according to the shrewdly appraised needs of Nazi policies, were drawn into the work for more than a decade: physical anthropology and biology, all branches of the social sciences and the humanities— until the engineers moved in to build the gas chambers and crematories.
Nazi ideologies, embodied in the speeches but also in the heinous acts, fed off and fed scholarship in the social and biological sciences, as Weinrich documents.
One of the disciplines that attracted the Nazi’s special attention was Anthropology. Eugenics had its run and found its sympathisers from the last decades of the 19th century, and Anthropology began to be reinvented to suit both the eugenics ideals and the demands of the Nazi state. Studies of the history of Anthropology by Michael Burleigh, Robert Proctor and others note that most academics among the anthropologists then readily placed their knowledge at the service of the state. However, it must also be observed that anthropologists elsewhere too were pro-Nazi in their outlook, most notably George HLF Pitt-Rivers, E.A. Hooton, just as some anthropologists like Margaret Mead and David Mandelbaum used their skills to support American/Allied war efforts. (Mead, for example, reshaped American dietary habits for wartime, and Ruth Benedict contributed to a pamphlet decrying racial superiority theories.)
Driven by scientism, an unquestionable thirst for knowledge about races and a questionable ethics of experimenting on captive subjects dying of starvation, the Nazi anthropologists — among whom, one day, we would find a certain Josef Mengele, who acquired a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Munich — contributed to the war effort.
The morphological data of Nazi physical anthropologists was acquired from captive test subjects, often at gunpoint, while being readied for slave labour and/or extermination. Physical anthropology aided the war effort directly: those whose measurements identified them as Jewish or Romana (gypsy) were marked for execution, while others were sent to either the war front or to work camps. But did they think of the costs of their research in terms of their test subjects? This is the question Gretchen Schafft ponders in her 2004 work, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Schafft summarizes the discipline’s history in a simple yet powerful sentence in the Epilogue to the book:
Nazi anthropology had one overriding goal: to assist the government in making the German Reich a rational, unified, homogeneous state with the most optimal gene pool that science could provide.
How the anthropologists went about it is interesting.
Anthropologists from around Germany and occupied territories offered their services to the state. They wished to not only contribute to anthropometry and racial science, but also to have a role in the collection, classification and study of the mortal remains of the executed Jews, of the ‘valuable and useful Jewish skeletons’, as a letter from the University of Vienna to the Nazi government put it. Similar letters seeking access to the data, verbal, printed and material (bones) of the Jews were written to Heinrich Himmler and other Nazi officers by anthropologists. Certificates attesting to racial heredity were issued by the Anthropological Institute of Vienna. In addition to bodily features, the anthropologists were also able to study the families of the interred in ghettos, their health, family profession and economic status before the war. They also traced origins: whether the Austrian Jews were of Eastern or Oriental ancestry, and had any connections with, say, the Armenians. The anthropologists, chillingly and calculatedly, were compiling data for a time when only these records would survive of the Jews, while the Jews as a population would be completely wiped off the earth. In short, racial anthropology served the Nazi state in its long-term goals where only documents would remain as a historical record of an entire race – documents compiled, dissected and interpreted, now and in the future, by Nazi ‘scientists’.
The work of Eugen Fischer on hybrid (mixed-race) communities served the purposes of the Nazi state well. What is less well known is that Fischer’s work especially on the antecedents and linkages of the Germanic people with the prehominids, and the work of another anthropologist, Walter Scheidt, with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute received support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Scheidt declared, “Anthropology can become THE research into the laws of societal life, and thus the art of racial hygiene.” In the 1930s, Fischer argued in his works that the mixture of three racial groups — the Dinaric, the Nordic and the Alpine — made the Germanic race vastly amplified and superior. This argument, from the most famous anthropologist of the time, voiced also in a talk The Concept of the Volk-State, as Viewed Biologically by Fischer in July 1933, suited the Nazi party and prepared the grounds for the future. An early work Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, of which Fischer was one of the co-authors and which was dedicated to Adolf Hitler by the publisher, although Hitler was not yet in power, reiterated the above argument.
Besides work on racial types, the anthropologists also contributed to studies of twins, under the belief that such studies would reveal the secrets of racial origins and mixing. In the words of Eugen Fischer:
We need—I repeat again—an Erbpflege [a fostering of heredity], in large part conscious and goal-directed. Erbpflege is a better word for genetics than racial hygiene it promotes those who are healthy in mind and body, those with a Germanic heritage, those who carry our way of life. Only that is a population policy!
Fischer found able support in the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the formidable physicist Max Planck who wrote to the government:
I am honored to inform the Minister of the Interior that the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft for the Advancement of Science is willing to place itself systematically at the service of the Reich in the area of racial hygienic research.
State policy, scientific institutions and the discipline of anthropology had fused in the pursuit of a common goal: racial purity.
Also read: How Textbooks and AI are Being Used to Shape Our Understanding of the Past
One of the first manifestations of this fusion appears in the same year, as the Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, promulgated on July 14, 1933. The law covered the following conditions: schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, congenital mental deficiency, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary chorea (Huntington’s Disease), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, any severe hereditary deformity and alcoholism — sufferers of which would be prevented from reproducing. Institutes like the Kaiser Wilhelm provided the data about race on which these policies were built.
The anthropologists benefited from bibliographers. The Frankfurt am Main Institute for the Research of the Jewish Question compiled over 280,000 volumes of Jewish literature from the occupied countries and bibliographers prepared detailed notes on Polish bibliographic sources about, in particular, histories of human settlements and their racial composition. The Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO) and the Sektion Rassenund Volkstumsforschung (SRV) created a field called ‘ethnic research’. The ‘Volkstum Division’ that liaised with the IDO and SRV had its anthropological job clearly defined:
The Volkstum Division is making efforts to carry the concept of ethnic research far beyond what has hitherto been understood by the term as it is used in academic circles. This ethnic research requires the total encompassing of the life history of peoples, what they carry with them from all sides, such as their racial history, their biology, their demographics, sociology, ethno-politics, and Volk psychology. Ethnic investigation includes the health of a people, including their limitations due to inherited illnesses and conditions. It includes the [cultural] movements of the people, their customs and expressions of them in form and content, the feeling for nationhood and mythmaking, the problems and conflicts on the speech and ethnic boundaries, and much more. In short, all that contributes to a group’s active or passive expression of race and identity. (Cited in Schafft)
While these famous institutes worked through massive volumes of material to demonstrate the validity of their theories, several ‘learned’ societies were established to achieve the same results, but through a different means. With a keen anthropological anxiety regarding racial origins, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, an occultist, founded the Thule Society (Thule in mythology is considered the homeland of those who survived the collapse of Atlantis). The Ahnenerbe Society, likewise, was established to research German archaeology. Such societies mixed myth with history, fudged the historical record, and made pronouncements on the Germanic race (pure), the fabulous lineages (pure), and the need to preserve these. Clearly, there would have been no genocidal state without education and its entire apparatus, from textbooks to research.
The racial anthropologists and archaeologists determined that the Germanic races needed different origin stories. Educational texts, films, and archaeological publications for popular audiences produced in the 1933-1945 period represented the origins of the German people as beginning with a form of ethnoparthenogenesis in northern Europe in the Paleolithic era. As Bettina Arnold notes in her essay ‘Justifying Genocide: Archaeology and the Construction of Difference’:
How these populations of anatomically modern humans got to Europe in the first place is shrouded in obscurity in most of these [Nazi] texts, since an eastern or African origin was inconsistent with the notion of a unique and superior Germanic gene pool.
But such finer nuances of the historical and archaeological record were deemed irrelevant. Documents produced by academics, who were beginning to function more as mouthpieces of the Nazi Party, mapped the history of the people as ‘Time of Becoming, Time of Maturation, Time of Struggle, Time of Suffering/Testing, Time of Self-Awakening in Richard Ströbel’s The Origins of Our People: 5000 Years of Nordic-Germanic Cultural Evolution, complete with a diagram of the genealogy (1935). This representation was intended, Bettina Arnold writes:
to link German children in their 1935 classrooms to the unbroken chain of “Germanic” peoples, protagonists in the latest chapter of a cycle of repeated testing, represented by genetic and cultural crises and eventual triumph in the twentieth century.
Such writings, in other words, spoke of a great, unbroken Germanic tradition and genealogy: a myth, but believed and propagated for all it was worth.
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The impact and indoctrination of these moves in the disciplines were serious. German racial anthropology went transnational, recent studies show. Its influence on Indian researchers in the field, like Irawati Karve, argues Thiago Barbosa, is to be found in the descriptive and analytical models employed to study human difference, of castes and ethnic groups. In the case of Profulla Chandra Biswas, a biological anthropologist and the founding head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delhi, whose supervisor was Eugen Fischer, Nazi anthropological theories were of great influence. Biswas ‘argue[d] that India should learn from the eugenics policies of the Nazi German state, and focus on controlling reproduction’, and ensure that only the ’best stock’ of ‘individuals with superior qualities’ should be allowed to breed, as Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi in a recent study has noted.
The culture of war and genocide requires, first, culture wars. When we examine disciplines for their racial, colonial and other origins, we do not necessarily attribute evil motives to their present-day scholars, but contextualizing a discipline’s evolution enables us to critically examine its legacies, connections and influences.
Admittedly, as one of the world’s leading commentators on the anthropology of genocide, Alexander Laban Linton, notes in his introduction to Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, that due to the cultural relativism that marks the present era,
if one assumes that the values of other societies are as legitimate as one’s own, how can one condemn horrendous acts that are perpetrated in terms of those alternative sets of morals, since the judgment that something is “horrendous” may be ethnocentric and culturally relative?
When modernity has reified difference and the modern state requires precise borders, numbers and units – thereby requiring difference to be codified, organised and catalogued – it also froze people into essentialised difference. The anthropologists and apologists for genocide in Germany, 1933-1945, weaponised difference through their textbooks and academic papers. When a discipline like Anthropology became the academic wing of Nazism, it gave the theoretical heft to a genocidal state.
Also read: Demon Demographics, Nazi Germany and the Making of Racialised Anxiety
One leaves the last words on the Nazification of an academic discipline, fully alert to its contemporary resonances, echoes and iterations in terms of modified textbooks, altered historical records and twisted pedagogies, to Max Weinreich:
the German rulers had theorists at hand who praised their achievements in reducing the Jews and supplied the academic formulae and the scholarly backing for each further step in German policies, until the “extinguishment” of the “eternally hostile forces” was accomplished to the best of the murderers’ abilities. Nor did this last step lack theoretical backing… The Nazis set out with a comparatively small number of outsiders but soon they were joined by mounting numbers of people of regular academic standing, some of them scholars of note. As time progressed, the bulk of university scholars, of scholarly periodicals, of publishing houses was entirely Nazified.
Weinrich is cautioning us about the academics and researchers who give their discipline and training into the service of hate and genocide.
And Weinrich’s final statements are spine-chilling:
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.
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.