Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics

Abstract: Between 1927 and 1945, physicians, anthropologists and other researchers conducted research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem on questions of the heredity of a wide variety of physical and mental characteristics. Their interests in knowledge and methods were closely integrated into National Socialist policies of exclusion and extermination. They are based, among other things, on colonial collections and discriminatory assumptions about "races".

In 2014, a large number of human and animal bone fragments were discovered during renovation work on a book tower at Freie Universität Berlin. [1] The fact that the construction of this book tower took place from 1975 to 1977 on the grounds of the former "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics" (hereinafter referred to as KWI-A) suggests that the recovered bone fragments had served for its research and had been deliberately buried before 1945.

Between 1927 and 1945, doctors and scientists at the KWI-A not only conducted numerous animal experiments, especially on rabbits, in order to expand their knowledge of humans. [2] The fact that small plastic labels were found on the skeletal parts and that a plaster cast of a human torso was also found in one of the pits points to anthropological research and collection practices – and thus to the probable origin of the bones in the KWI-A.

For fifteen years, the KWI-A housed one of the most important anthropological collections from the German colonial period, the so-called "S-Collection". The collection had been created at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology under Felix von Luschan from the 1880s onwards and came to the Dahlem Institute in 1928 from the University of Berlin, where KWI-A founding director Eugen Fischer taught. [3] More than 5,000 human skulls and skeletons were housed in the attic at Ihnestraße 22 before a large part of the remains were moved to Freyenstein in northern Brandenburg in July 1943 in over 90 boxes, together with reference books[4] – a transfer that was intended to protect the collection from war damage. In 1947, the retrieved boxes returned to Berlin and were stored and researched at various Berlin locations in the decades that followed. ^[5] Only a few bones from the "S-Collection", including those of the Damara farm worker Uikabis and her daughter Nabnas, who were murdered in 1906 in German South West Africa by farmer Paul Wiehager as a deterrent, have so far been identified and returned to the societies of origin. [6] The majority are now kept in depots of the Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin Friedrichshagen.

In addition to the use of the "S-Collection", employees of the KWI-A continued their own initiatives to collect human and animal skeletons, organs and embryos. [7] Researchers at the KWI-A did not only use human specimens that came from Nazi extermination camps. [8] Contemporary publications by Karin Magnussen, who worked at the Institute from 1941, also show that the Berlin anatomist Hermann Stieve provided the KWI-A with a "series" of human eyes. [9] Although their origins are not discussed in detail, it is known that Stieve dissected corpses of executed persons from the Berlin Plötzensee prison between 1933 and 1945 at the Anatomical Institute of the Berlin Charité. Those convicted there came not only from the German Reich, but also from the occupied territories of Europe. [10] In addition, "eye specimens of coloured races" were kept at the institute, on the basis of which Magnussen examined the occurrence of certain characteristics and anomalies in the eye in different "races". [11]

In the case of the Sinti family Mechau, the organ specimens researched at the KWI-A could be assigned to individual victims of the National Socialist persecution and extermination policy. [12] Nothing further is known about the origin and whereabouts of other human remains from research on organ preparations. Further research would be required to clarify whether the bone remains found on the site from 2014 onwards can be directly assigned to one of the above-mentioned collection and transmission contexts.

Heredity and "race" research at the KWI-A was based on human remains from surviving collections as well as from contemporary places of injustice and crime. However, the institute's research also extended to living persons who were interned in such places.

In April 1931, the physician and zoologist Wolfgang Abel became an assistant at the KWI-A. He not only conducted research there, but also prepared numerous expert reports on the ancestry and "race" affiliation of various people (see below). [13] Abel's personal file at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin mentions disciplinary consequences for his "leading role in student protests against Jews" during his studies in Vienna. [14] On January 1, 1941, he became director of a new department at the KWI-A dedicated to "racial research". [15] At the same time, Abel, who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 and a member of the SS since 1935, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940/41. [16] It was not until November 1942 that he resumed his post at the KWI-A in order to continue his research "in the field of normal human genetics". [17] For the year 1944, it is mentioned that Abel was particularly concerned with the establishment of "his newly founded University Institute for Racial Biology" and its teaching. [18]

The list of publications of the Department of Racial Studies is short compared to the other departments of the KWI-A. But their publications, as well as some photographs, prove that Abel researched African prisoners of war. For example, an article published in 1943 comments on several photo series of Sudanese prisoners of war, which were taken from strictly standardized angles and then categorized into "ethnic types" of Sudan on the basis of the photos. Abel had taken anthropometric photos of about 350 people in several camps "on the occasion of an examination of prisoners of war" as a "consulting anthropologist" of army psychology at the "Inspection of the Personnel Testing of the Army". [19] The fact that he made a selection and photographed only the "persons who best reflect the type" of individual groups (or "tribes") shows the bias and lack of representativeness of his investigations and interpretations of supposed "race" characteristics. [20] In addition to the typification of alleged "tribes", he was also interested in the "racial composition or mixing of different areas", which he tried to determine by comparing the series with groups from other regions of origin.

In addition to this publication, some individual photographs have survived, which were probably taken for propaganda purposes. In one of them, Abel himself is depicted at an unknown location with some black prisoners of war. [21] Sachsenhausen is a possible location for the photograph, as is Luckenwalde or one of the camps in occupied France: The KWI-A had a branch in a tuberculosis hospital near the Sachsenhausen camp in Sommerfeld, which was headed by the physician Karl Diehl. In the summer of 1942, 8,000 radiophotographic images of colonial soldiers were examined there. It is not known exactly from which camp or military hospital the soldiers who were used for this and other investigations came. The captured soldiers were also transferred within the German sphere of influence: for example, some of the colonial prisoners held in Germany in Luckenwalde were brought to France when an important military hospital had just been set up in Saint-Médard near Bordeaux. [22] It is documented that Abel examined lepers, and especially the skin on their hands, in this special colonial medical hospital in occupied France. [23] Ernst Rodenwaldt, hygienist and tropical physician in Kiel and later in Heidelberg, stayed in St-Médard from 1941 onwards. Although he does not name Abel specifically, he recalls that there is "much to be said about the extremely valuable research [at St-Médard] on the treatment of lepers and especially [...] tuberculosis in people of color, which had many ambiguities that needed to be clarified." [24] In an interrogation in 1945, he spoke again about "experiments in a 'Negro prison camp' (1940) near Bordeaux." [25]

Overall, there are only a few studies that deal with investigations of colonial prisoners of war in the Second World War, and even less is known about the perspectives of those affected on these investigations. [26] While their internment has been the subject of a number of publications,[27] their misuse for scientific and medical purposes is less well documented – although it is certain that the Dahlem KWI-A played a role here.

From the winter of 1941/42, Abel researched prisoners of war for a second time, this time especially Soviet soldiers, of whom more than 7,000 were forced to undergo examinations. [28] In order to evaluate the recordings made of this group of victims, Abel planned to employ prisoners from the Sachsenhausen camp as forced laborers at the KWI-A. [29]

The examples of prisoner investigations show how war spaces influenced the scope of action of "race" science. Occupation contexts made transnational studies possible, sometimes motivated by colonial ambitions.

In some cases, experiments on prisoners, albeit outside the KWI-A, demonstrably went beyond measurements and investigations. Eugen Fischer's successor at the helm of the KWI-A, Otmar von Verschuer, had blood samples of various "races" sent from Auschwitz to Dahlem. The work of his colleague Karl Horneck in the same field explicitly involved Black prisoners of war: with the help of the serological laboratory of the Hospice Général in Le Havre, he tried to make "race" diagnoses based on blood and to prove the "race" specificity of antibodies. After initially conducting experiments on rabbits, he injected Black prisoners of war with "white serum" several times in 1943 at the Saint-Médard military hospital to test immunization. [30]

Researchers at the KWI-A in Dahlem helped to differentiate between groups of people and developed identification methods for different groups or continued them. In doing so, they did not only aim to formulate specific (colonial, anthropological, medical, etc.) expertise. As Eugen Fischer had already succeeded in doing with his study of the inhabitants of Rehoboth, they rather tried to establish fundamental concepts and open up new fields in basic research, such as that of "anthropobiology". [31]

Research was often closely linked to political agendas, as shown by the positions on the forced sterilization of Afro-German children from the Rhineland, which were also developed at the KWI-A.

In 1933, the KWI-A was commissioned to conduct a study in the context of the radicalization of policies towards Black children of occupation in the Rhineland. The aim of the investigations, which Wolfgang Abel undertook, was not only to assess the abilities of these children, but also to make a statement about the "racial significance of [the] admixture of foreign blood" in the border areas. [32] On the basis of scientific studies and school documents, Abel not only established the inferiority of dozens of children from Wiesbaden, whose Moroccan or Vietnamese fathers had been stationed in the Rhineland as part of the French occupying armies, compared to supposedly "Aryan" children. When special commissions were set up in 1937 under the chairmanship of the Gestapo to sterilize hundreds of such children, he and Eugen Fischer were involved insofar as their eugenic and "anthropological" reports helped decide on these sterilizations. [33] As the example of the KWI-A's involvement in the Rhineland shows, National Socialist and colonial backgrounds of eugenic policies were often closely intertwined.