Gretchen Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 297 pp. While an undeniably disturbing work, From Racism to Genocide is one of the more important books on the history of anthropology to be published in the last three decades. The importance of Gretchen Schafft's book can perhaps best be measured by considering the enormous weight of uncomfortably uncontested silence surrounding scholarly considerations of the uses and meanings of anthropology under the Nazis. The significance of this silence becomes apparent upon consideration of what Schafft accomplishes in this vital book. Schafft not only breaks this silence using unsettling and rich documentation; but she provides nuanced interpretations and ethical critiques of these anthropological misapplications. While other scholars have written about anthropology under the Nazis, none of these previous works approach either the level of documentation, depth of study, or the strength of interpretive analysis offered by Schafft. For years Schafft painstakingly gathered and evaluated an astounding amount of German, Polish and American archival materials pertaining to the development and uses of anthropology during the Third Reich, but the genius of this book is found in Schafft's synthetic analysis of the ways that anthropologists accommodated their to the needs of the Nazi state. Schafft accomplishes several remarkable feats-any one of these would have been a worthy scholarly accomplishment, but to achieve all of these is singularly remarkable. First, she documents how anthropological science informed Nazi political views. Second, Schafft clarifies how Nazi anthropologists helped make the German Reich a rational, unified, homogenous state with the most optimal gene pool that could provide (247). Third, she chronicles how anthropologists learned to shape and self-censor their scientific findings to better fit the needs of the total Nazi state. Fourth, she shows how medical doctors trained by anthropologists in racial hygiene and anthropology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (KWIA) participated in sterilization and genocidal euthanasia campaigns. Finally, Schafft establishes that anthropologists knew their work was facilitating horrendous human experiments and campaigns of deportation and genocide. The most famous Nazi formally trained in anthropology was Josef Mengele, but Hitler's notions of race and purity were also initially informed by his reading of anthropological theories. Most anthropologists' contributions to Nazi efforts were of the small, complacent variety. Some anthropologists served as Nazi bureaucratic functionaries enabling rather than challenging the Nazi's insidious laws, working at places like the Anthropological Institute of Vienna where their reputations added legitimacy to the practice of validating heredity certificates in compliance with Nazi policies. The Nazis were able to narrow the range of views in academies by intimidating and firing anthropologists who challenged party doctrine. Eugen Fischer was interrogated by the SS Office of Population and Genetic Health, and was told to expect an early retirement if he continued his research on the positive outcomes of racial mixing. Fischer complied (though Schafft notes many of his views were already aligned with Nazi ideology) and he became a leader in Nazi academia. Schafft found that, both a carrot and a stick were held out to anthropologists in the Third Reich. Hitler was talking their language in many instances, although the establishment anthropologists had been more careful in mincing their words (71). …
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Aug 1, 2023
Felicia Bartley 
Open Access