Anthropology was the means used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to identify racial differences and establish a systematic hierarchy of racial treatment in Nazi Germany, according to the Thursday lecture by a visiting professor in anthropology.
Gretchen Schafft, professor in anthropology from American University, ended her lecture with this quote from the secretary of a Nazi anthropologist: “No, we didn’t have any misgivings; it was science after all.”
Schafft explained the role that anthropology played in the Nazi regime, focusing on its influence in Poland. She told how actions follow ideologies, which are basically the manner of thinking characteristic of a group or culture. Ideologies are not often questioned and the dangerous ideologies of pre-World War II Germany were able to develop without questioning their truth or consequences, Schafft said.
Among these ideologies were beliefs in racial differences, a hierarchy of races, and in the right to attack those deemed unworthy. These ideas were highly spread with many popular books written on the subject. Anthropologists had a large effect on Hitler and he read many books on racial ideology while he was imprisoned, she said.
Eugenics is a science that moves toward creating a perfect race by allowing people to procreate if they are worthy and prevent them if they are not, and Hitler believed that the German race was becoming less valuable by mixing with other races. Schafft said when Hitler came to power, race was the key to his social regime and he organized it to identify races.
Anthropology was the tool used to identify races, and it combined social and biological characteristics to do so. Shafft said that race was supposed to be measurable, but it often ultimately depended on the “eyeball” test.
This test was often just having a person walk in front of an anthropologist for them to determine what race they were. Schafft said that the Nazi anthropologists were not really prosecuted after the war and afterwards often continued teaching the same ideas, only slightly modified.
One student said that it is important to understand the past practices of individuals to learn not to repeat them.
“I think it’s always important that, as intellectuals, we acknowledge the past so that it won’t be repeated,” Jennifer Russell, junior anthropology interest, said.
“I think that this particularly carries, or could carry, through to any of the work that we will do in the future. We are the future of our endeavors of our chosen fields, so it is up to us to understand our past and make sure that it isn’t repeated,” Russell said.
Another student said that some people choose not to understand the past.
“This was a terrible, terrible thing that has occurred and that they committed, and there still are thousands and thousands of people who don’t believe it, who don’t realize and choose not to realize it happened,” Robert Shepard, freshman language interest, said.
Schafft’s book “From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich” explores the role of anthropology in Nazi Germany.
