The Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp in Ukraine, and Its North American Legacy

Abstract

Scholars have recently debated the topic of German academics who directly or indirectly served the Nazi machinery of death and who then went on to successful professional careers after the war. This article examines the activities of two prominent émigré scholars, Drs. Georg Leibbrandt (1899-1982) and Karl Stumpp (1896-1982). These Ukrainian Germans emigrated to Germany after World War 1. In America, most members of the Russian-German ethnic community never knew that Leibbrandt had represented Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, or that under his supervision Stumpp led a Sonderkommando in Ukraine. This unit classified hundreds of villages, indirectly documenting the annihilation of Jews and others. The authors conclude that one consequence of Leibbrandt's and Stumpp's "return to normalcy" after the war was the growing fascination with genealogical research that affected the Russian-German ethnic community in North America-research partly based on 1930s and 1940s Nazi racial record-keeping.