The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945

When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics opened its doors in 1927, it could rely on wide political approval, ranging from the Social Democrats over the Catholic Centre to the far rightwing of the party spectrum. In 1933 the institute and its founding director Eugen Fischer came under pressure to adjust, which they were able to ward off through Selbstgleichschaltung (auto-coordination). The Third Reich brought about a mutual beneficial servicing of science and politics. With their research into hereditary health and racial policies the institute's employees provided the Brownshirt rulers with legitimating grounds. At international meetings they used their scientific standing and authority to defend the abundance of forced sterilizations performed in Nazi Germany. Their expertise was instrumental in registering and selecting/eliminating Jews, Sinti and Roma, "Rhineland bastards", Erbkranke and Fremdvölkische. In return, hereditary health and racial policies proved to be beneficial for the institute, which beginning in 1942, directed by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, performed a conceptual change from the traditional study of races and eugenics into apparently modern phenogenetics - not least owing to the entgrenzte (unrestricted) accessibility of people in concentration camps or POW camps, in the ghetto, in homes and asylums. In 1943/44 Josef Mengele, a student of Verschuer, supplied Dahlem with human blood samples and eye pairs from Auschwitz, while vice versa seizing issues and methods of the institute in his criminal researches.

The volume at hand traces the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics between democracy and dictatorship. Special attention is turned to the transformation of the research program, the institute's integration into the national and international science panorama, and its relationship to the ruling power as well as its interconnection to thepolitical crimes of Nazi Germany.

Résumé
From its founding in 1927 until its dissolution in 1945, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem transgressed many a boundary; indeed, the transgression of boundaries was in a sense its raison d'être from the outset. Initially this applied to the boundaries within the disciplinary canon of the human sciences. Even from its basic conception, the institute, centered around the person of its founding director Eugen Fischer (1874 1967), was to unify anthropology, genetics, and eugenics under one roof. In ke- ing with the understanding predominant in Germany between the wars, anthropology went beyond the scope of the framework of the ascendant race theory to cover not only physical anthropology, including paleoanthropology, but also elements of what we today would call cultural and social anthropology. Thus, this anthropology extended far into the fields of archeology, paleontology, prehistory and early h- tory, history and sociology, and especially into ethnology and folklore. Human genetics, in turn, was more than the attempt to apply to humans the genetics dev- oped by Thomas Hunt Morgan (18661945) and his school in the USA on the model of drosophila. In Germany, Morgan's genetics, which concentrated on investigating the dissemination of genetic traits on the chromosomes and their morphological structure, was received with skepticism for two reasons.

Contenu

A "Purely Theoretical Institute for the Study of the Nature of Man": The Founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1920-1927.- "The Human of the Future Under the Scrutiny of Research": The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in the Weimar Republic, 1927-1933.- The "Faustian Bargain": The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in the National Socialist Era, 1933-1938/1942.- In the Realm of Opportunity: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics during World War II, 1938/42-1945.- Boundary Transgressions.