10 German Racial Anthropology 1904 to 1945

Prefatory Note

From the eighteenth century across the span of the nineteenth, the German overseas empire was small. Despite that, German thinkers had a remarkably powerful influence on anthropological thought. This all changed in the early twentieth century, when German anthropology was hijacked by racial eugenics and diverged dramatically both from prior German thinking and the new directions anthropology followed in the United States, Britain, and France. With the ascendance of Nazism in 1933, the doctrine of Nordic supremacy and the practice of genocidal mass murder set German anthropology on a peculiar path. Since the end of World War Two in 1945, German anthropology has been a much smaller and less influential endeavor. This reading helps explain why.

The dates used to bracket this chapter need some discussion. As we discussed earlier, the concept of race was in some ways a German invention, traceable to Immanuel Kant’s work on anthropology during the German Enlightenment. Hence German racial anthropology is more than a century older than 1904. So why begin with 1904? The choice seems apt, because 1904 is the year Germany began waging a genocidal war against the Herero people in what today is Namibia, but in 1904 was the colony of German Southwest Africa. Many historians today find eerie continuities between German practices in Southwest Africa and the Holocaust. As to 1945, that is the year that World War Two ended with the surrender of Germany, followed by abbreviated efforts to exact justice from a few at the Nuremberg trials. Those four decades were significant for anthropology, because they marked a turn toward eugenic ideologies in German anthropology, and indeed the wider world.

1. Introduction: The HOLOCAUST IN THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

From the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century, European anthropologists confidently placed their own societies at the pinnacle of human development. Savage and barbarous peoples were felt to exist on a level far below the opulent civilized societies. Beyond material wealth and military dominance, there was a claim to civility. Hence as the European powers met in Berlin in 1885 to “partition” Africa – a Conference where Germany belatedly claimed its overseas empire – which included 12 forerunners to contemporary African nations,  (including Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, Tanganyika and Rwanda), it was viewed as a beneficent act rather than a brutal conquest. But in the first half of the twentieth century, confidence in European cultural superiority was sorely shaken twice.

From a European perspective, the first modern, massive failure of European civility – widely recognized by western intellectuals – was World War One. The first “world war” brought to a close a long period of relatively steady peace and growing prosperity. The war was ghastly enough to put the idea of civilization in question in ways rivaled only by the aftermath of the French Revolution (Fussell, 2000). Industrial warfare, which introduced chemical gases, mechanization, and the futility of trench warfare, was disastrous in ways that even impacted anthropology. Germany lost most of its overseas empire, and some of the most notable French thinkers of the era died in battle. Worse yet, the “war to end all wars” – as the First World War was hopefully labeled – led to the even greater disaster of World War Two barely two decades later.

But to European social thinkers, nothing was more disturbing than the death camps of the Holocaust. Partly this reflects the sheer viciousness of a targeted effort to exterminate civilian non-combatants outside of combat zones. But even more disturbing was the racial ideology that powered the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany in its execution. And yet more troubling was the role of intellectuals and academics in developing that ideology. How could the most educated and affluent nation in Europe – as Germany was in 1914 – a nation that invented the research university and was known for its rich scientific, mathematical, musical, literary, and philosophical heritage, engage in such barbaric acts? How could scientists take part in it? To this date more books are published on the Holocaust than any other topic in European history.

For anthropologists, the human tragedy of the Holocaust is especially difficult to wrestle with. We have been slow to respond, and few histories of the field address it. Perhaps this is because the ideologies and practices that powered the Holocaust are not unfamiliar. When racial ideologies and genocidal practices are considered in comparative perspective, the implications are devastating. Anthropologists witnessed startlingly similar campaigns to exterminate indigenous communities in the colonial expansion that fueled the growth of anthropology as a discipline. Moreover, anthropologists had participated in intellectual struggles over the ideologies used to justify the Holocaust (e.g., racial polygenism). The fact that it happened “at home” in Europe, and that the Nazi campaign targeted Europeans of Jewish descent (along with Roma, homosexuals, labor activists, and communists) was particularly disconcerting. Especially in Germany, people of Jewish identity were highly assimilated into local, regional, and national intellectual and cultural life, and their numbers were relatively small. And Jewish intellectuals made disproportionate contributions to anthropology in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. When Boas and many of his students spoke out against Nazism, they were speaking out against a movement that would, if possible, end their lives.

The geography of  mass murder is telling. It is obscene to minimize the trauma inflicted on Germans of Jewish heritage, and that is not my intent. But in terms of sheer numbers and merciless murder, the brutality of the Holocaust – like that of the Second World War generally – increased as one moved eastward. Jews in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans were less assimilated than in Germany, and their numbers were much larger. The Final Solution reached its most depraved expression in the east, and the death factories and local execution squads achieved their most horrific efficiency. In retrospect, the violence looked like the murderous practices in the United States and overseas European colonies. This raises a telling question. Was the Holocaust truly unique? Or was it colonialism brought home? If the latter is admitted to be possible, an even more disturbing question follows: If the complicity of many German anthropologists in the Holocaust is sickening, was the complicity of many American and European anthropologists in colonialism any less so?

Among European historians, one way the Holocaust has been dealt with is known as the Sonderweg thesis. Sonderweg translates as “special path.” The Sonderweg thesis holds that German history is peculiar, and the peculiarities of German history explain why Nazism and the Holocaust happened there, rather than elsewhere. Germany, it is asserted, took a different path in making the transition from tradition to modernity. As a result, rather than growing from an enlightened monarchy into a liberal democracy with a thriving industrial economy, Germany devolved into nightmarish madness and mass murder (Blackbourn and Eley, 1994). Does the Sonderweg thesis apply to anthropology. Does the involvement of German anthropology reflect the peculiarities of German anthropology? Is it possible that the Holocaust has no analogy in British, French, or American anthropology?

2. Colonialism Brought Home?

Why Hitler? Why the Holocaust? Why Germany? These are at once the most studied, and the most unsettled question in twentieth century European history. But the Sonderweg thesis simply carries the original question forward. What was so special about the German road to modernity that it would lead to such an outcome?

Cultural values and beliefs are blamed, particularly antisemitism. Institutions and social agents are held culpable, especially those of the conservative Junker elite. A prime suspect is the Treaty of Versailles, as well as a period of hyperinflation that, together with Fascism, undermined the Weimar Republic. Other historians point to new forms of mass media and propaganda. Science is also held culpable – especially Social Darwinism and eugenics. So is religion. Only the Jehovah’s Witnesses – of whom their were few in Germany – spoke out against Nazism. Both Catholic and Lutheran leaders were complicit. Both the Enlightenment’s celebration of reason and the Counter-Enlightenment’s enthusiasm for nationalism share the blame. Obviously, this leaves plenty of guilt to the Nazi leadership, from Hitler on down, and Nazi leaders have been profiled in excruciating detail – along with the ordinary men (and women) who carried out their orders, seemingly without hesitation or resistance, and – with the war finished – quietly went back to their ordinary lives (Browning, 2014).

One of the most disturbing proposals – for both American and European anthropologists – is that Nazism represents colonialism brought home. The same supremacist ideologies and genocidal policies that were imposed on European Jews and Gypsies between 1933 – 1945 were initially developed and used against indigenous peoples and forced laborers around the world in prior decades and centuries. And not just by Germans. Horrific events transpired in the Congo, a colony of Belgium, where millions died, as well as in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in colonies held by the Dutch, English, French, and Americans, not to mention the early conquests of the Spanish and Portuguese.

Germany was a latecomer to the colonial playing field, first gaining significant overseas possessions in the decades either side of the turn of the century. But although late to the game, the Germans quickly joined in the perpetration of atrocities. One of the most studied cases is the German colony of Southwest Africa (today known as Namibia). Between 1904 and 1908 the German military waged a genocidal war against the Herero people. The machinery of genocide included concentration camps, forced labor details, and military assaults that were pitilessly uneven, pitting machine guns against spears (Madley, 2005; Zimmerer and Zeller, 2008). And alongside the invention of death camps and forced marches, there was continuity in personnel. Some of the Nazi leadership, and some leading Nazi anthropologists, got their start in German Southwest Africa.

2.1 The American West and the German East

In addition to studies of Germany’s overseas colonies, much attention has focused on the deep history of German expansion eastward into Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia, and into Eastern Europe more broadly (e.g., Hungary, the Czech lands, and the Balkans; see Burleigh, 1988). A rich literature has also developed that explores the impact of American manifest destiny on the idea and practice of German settler colonialism, and ultimately the Nazi push eastward (Kopp, 2012). It has also been argued that a frontier mentality made war on the Eastern Front particularly vicious and unforgiving (Shepard, 2009).

From this perspective, while the Allied powers – the United States, Britain, (Russia) and France – were on the right side of history in defeating Nazism and fascism in Europe, they had their own systems of racial segregation at home and in their colonies, and their own history of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence. This created ironic situations, such as colonized Africans in French West Africa forming the core of both the French Foreign Legion and the French Resistance, and colonized Africans in British East Africa serving in the British military, not too mention Native American, Filipino, Black, and Japanese Americans serving in the United States military to defeat totalitarian regimes in Europe and Japan, only to return home to a segregated society not only still structured by racial ideologies, but where efforts at segregation were accelerating.

2.2 The Peculiarities of Nazi Racial Anthropology

While eugenics and racial anthropology would find their most brutal expression in support of mass murder in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, it is important to stress again that ideologies and practices that are today associated primarily with the Nazi regime were embraced before 1939 across much of Europe, the United States, Japan, China, Latin America, and South Africa. Twentieth century eugenics and racism were global movements, and their victims everywhere were racial and ethnic minorities – as well as individuals who challenged sexual, gender norms, and embraced new political visions. There was variation from place to place in who was perpetrator and who was victim. Japan, for example, emulated Nazi practice in Korea and Manchuria, and ruled the Philippines and Taiwan with great brutality.

For many decades Nazi racial anthropology has been treated as an unfortunate, obscene detour, a peculiarity of German history that had no relation to legitimate anthropology. Nazi anthropology was certainly rich with malicious falsehoods, and its results were horrific and disastrous. If anthropology has had its share of low points, German anthropology from 1915 to 1945 is certainly one of the lowest. But treating German racial anthropology as a Sonderweg overlooks the fact that respected German academic anthropologists – both before and during the Nazi era – developed the conceptual framework that the Nazi’s vulgarized, even as they were disturbingly aligned with and fully aware of what was happening in anthropology elsewhere.

Aside from American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology, much work in the USA and Britain was following the path dominated by German pro-Nazi intellectuals. The work of German anthropologists who would later join the Nazi party followed scholarly conventions, and their early publications received serious review in American journals by American anthropologists. Indeed, there seems to have been a reluctance, until 1933, to call them out as cranks. Perhaps we can only say that science responds to absurdity slowly and politely, and it is not uncommon for the course of events to leave scientists looking foolish or complicit in the aftermath. In recent years, historians have started to study Nazi anthropology more closely, and a flood of literature has been published in the last two decades. The picture that emerges is not reassuring (see Hutton, 2005; Kyllingstad, 2014; Schaft, 2004; Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans, 2020).

At the most banal level, it has become evident that many German academics – including most German anthropologists – did not comport themselves as one might hope during the Nazi period. Not only did the majority German anthropologists not oppose the Nazification of their disciplines, nor resign in protest, most made no effort to leave the continent and join the resistance in the USA or Britain (something that many German physicists and intellectuals did do). And their diaries and papers do not support their post-war claims that they retreated – in an “inner migration” – and silently waited out the Nazi era in solitude, fearing for their lives while going through the motions to feign loyalty.

Quite the opposite.

Many publicly embraced Nazi ideology and actively sought Nazi funding and support, even before the Nazi’s gained power. They viewed Hitler’s Europe as a new pool of academic opportunity, and they continued to wage petty contests for academic advantage in patterns that pre-dated 1933. They trained ambitious graduate students who by all indications were thoroughly convinced of the correctness of Nazi racial science, and were eager to establish their reputation by applying anthropology in support of Nazi efforts at extermination.

The Austrian behavioral ethologist Konrad Lorenz presents one of the most egregious examples. Lorenz actively sought Nazi funding before 1933 and after,  long before Hitler invaded Austria. He presented his work as confirming Nazi racial ideologies. He served in special units in Poland that were directly involved in mass murder. After the war, he not only managed to escape detection and on to a peaceful death in Vienna in 1989, but was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. Sadly, he shared the award with Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch ethologist who spent two years in a Nazi detention camp for refusing to out his Jewish colleagues (Seaward, 2022).

Like Lorenz, some Nazi anthropologists became directly involved in mass murder. After the war ended – given the broad desire in German society to forget the past, and the reluctance of the Allies to prosecute more than a handful of cases at Nuremberg – they were able to deny and hide their complicity. Their roles are only recently being discovered as a result of growing interest by contemporary German historians.

3. Whither relativism? Robert Lowie’s Studies of Nordic Supremacism and German Culture

Frequently, cultural relativism is dismissed with a single question: “So, was Hitler just culturally different?” One of the first anthropologists to take a relativist approach to understanding the rise of Nazism in Germany was Robert Lowie (1883-1957). Like many of Franz Boas’s first cohort of students, Lowie was of German-Jewish heritage. In 1893, his family emigrated from the German community in Vienna, Austria to the Viennese-German expatriate community in New York City. With English very much a second language, in 1904, at twenty-one years of age, Lowie signed up to study anthropology with Franz Boas at Columbia University.

During the Second World War, Lowie was employed by the United States government. His charge was to help American military officers better understand their German opponents. Shortly after the war ended, Lowie traveled to Germany with his wife to do fieldwork. Their research method involved picking up hitchhiking Germans – of whom there were then many lacking transport – and engaging them in conversation. Lowie organized his teaching and two books around two topics, which he stressed were entirely separate: the richness of German culture, and the nonsense of the ideology of Nordic supremacism (Lowie, 1945; Lowie, 1954).

Lowie, along with Boas and his students, began challenging the “nonsense” of Nordic supremacy in the 1920s, when both intellectuals and ordinary people in Britain and the United States were as captured by proto-Nazi ideologies as anyone in Germany. Lowie’s major pre-war contribution was titled Are We Civilized? In it he demolished with good humor any suggestion that European civilization was superior to any other (Lowie, 1929). In his efforts to understand the Holocaust, Lowie found little reason to think that there was anything peculiar about German culture that led to it. Such political madness either has or could happen anywhere in the world. Neither did he feel any special anger or hatred toward the German people (as opposed to the Nazi leadership).

The need to distinguish between culture and political ideology seems to have been widely recognized among the Boasians. In this regard, it is worth noting that 19th century German anthropologists were generally highly critical of the concept of race – including the two German professors who most strongly influenced Boas: Adolph Bastian (1826-1905) and Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). This reflected both their deeply rooted monogenist heritage, and their extensive involvement in anthropometry, which taught them how difficult it was to sort humans into racial types. Indeed, a strong case can be made that the Boasian critique of Nazi racial eugenics was rooted in the German anthropological tradition.

A question follows: When then did German anthropology embrace eugenics and the “nonsense” of Nordic supremacy? Where did it come from? At present, the strongest arguments suggest that racial eugenics entered Germany from the United States, Britain, and France in two phases: first, in the context of German colonialism, and secondly, in the aftermath of World War One (Evans, 2010).

Concluding Remarks

When we contrast British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology to Nazi racial anthropology, the differences are in most ways profound. Given this, it is comforting to treat Nazi anthropology as a ghastly aberration and set it aside. But ignoring the Nazi era distorts our understanding of anthropology, for two reasons. First, it removes context from the efforts of anthropologists to challenge racism in the early twentieth century, and secondly, it dissuades us from exploring uncomfortable parallels and continuities between Nazi Germany and the Allied democracies in relation to colonialism and racial segregation.

For the most part, it appears plausible to say that, beyond ideological support, German anthropology contributed little to the German war effort, and little to the Holocaust. On the other hand, the perception that anthropology had a contribution to make was obviously shared by the Nazi leadership, as anthropology was one of the few university disciplines that expanded under Nazi rule. This observation parallels a point made by Talal Asad half a century ago in relation to anthropology as a whole: Anthropology contributed little to colonialism, but colonialism contributed much to the growth of anthropology as a discipline (Asad, 1973).

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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