Upheavals - Collaborators, defectors and outcasts

The present research project sets out to systematically investigate, analyse and answer the major remaining questions related to the tasks and practices of socio-cultural anthropology ("Völkerkunde") during the Nazi period at the University of Vienna. Due to its continuing affinity to physical anthropology and because of a relatively dense basis of party supporters in its own ranks, Völkerkunde belonged to that upper third among the humanities receiving considerable support and promotion under Hitler. After Austria`s annexation by the Wehrmacht, the Vienna institute became one of the largest of its field in the Third Reich and was completely re-organised. The relative significance of Völkerkunde among the humanities during the Third Reich represents a remarkable contrast to the low level of research that was carried out about this topic ever since. In order to overcome this gap, the Vienna case represents an excellent opportunity to carry out a best practice research project. In fact, the existing level of studies on the local history of Völkerkunde allows to precisely identify those seven remaining questions that still need thorough investigation. These questions are the guiding research principles for the present project, which is organised along comparative institutional and biographical methodological orientations. Three among this project proposal`s main research question thus follow those actors who were installed by the regime as the new and collaborating staff after the Nazi takeover. Pursuing those among their activities in Vienna and in the Reich which still remain unclear will require extensive search in private and public archives in Austria, Germany, Moscow and the United States. Among other aspects, this will for the first time also include an examination of student- teacher relations, and a comparative assessment of party and state funding for Völkerkunde in Vienna under Hermann Baumann and his cohort. A fourth among the seven research questions will continue to follow the well-known case of one early Nazi sympathiser and later defector, Christoph (von) Fürer- Haimendorf. He managed to move to British India just before the war broke out, and later became a president of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. It will be examined how Fürer-Haimendorf managed to appear as a POW to the Nazis, who published his "Der weisse Kopfjäger" as an entertainment booklet for the Wehrmacht as late as 1944, while he already was working for the British side. This will require archival work in India, London, and Vienna. Finally, three other among the seven research questions will follow the "outcasts" of 1938 from the Vienna institute into their Swiss and New York exiles, where they worked with the Vatican and the Habsburg family against the Nazis. Archival work and expert interviews will be carried out to that purpose in the United States, Vienna, India and Rome. Before 1938, the Vienna Völkerkunde institute was closely linked to official state politics in Austria, while after Hitler had taken over, the same institute was crucial for Hitler`s colonial ambitions in parts of Africa. This project therefore promises to shed new light not only on an understudies field of the humanities under the Nazis, and on its international dimensions, but also on some of the lesser known dimensions of intellectuals` crossroads in Hitler`s shadow. Andre Gingrich as the director of this project has contributed significantly to a new generation of studies about Völkerkunde under Hitler during the past decade. For this reason, he was invited to give the Sidney Mintz lecture in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins on this topic in 2004. His team of junior researchers in the present project includes his very best graduates and student participants from a recent series of research seminars at Vienna University (2003-2005). Through their theses and publications, these junior team members are already setting standards. The seminar series which has shaped their careers was the immediate consequence of Gingrich`s contributions to the inaugural lectures of the Max Planck institute for Social Anthropology. The project`s advisory board lists some of the top researchers in the interdisciplinary study of the humanities in the Third Reich. This proposal thus represents an innovative combination of junior and senior researchers, with the aim of achieving European excellence in an understudied field of key significance for understanding the immediate past of Europe`s present.

This project set out to investigate seven of the most important remaining issues concerning the activities and relations of academic socio-cultural anthropology (Völkerkunde) during the Nazi period in Vienna. As one among the largest university institutes/ departments and museums of this field in the "Reich", the Vienna example turned out to provide particularly informative insights into one of those fields of the humanities and social sciences which were substantially enhanced and promoted under Hitler's regime. Simultaneously, the department's staff who made it into exile in Switzerland, the US and the British Empire pursued academic orientations and political activities that indicated their increasing opposition to Nazism. For Vienna, this project documented and analyzed for the first time the well-prepared takeover of the institute by a pre-defined Nazi supporter from Berlin (Hermann Baumann) after the previously dominating school of Catholic missionaries had been ousted. Baumann's mission was to make the Vienna institute one of the Reich's leading research institutions for Nazi colonial ambitions in Africa. His somewhat belated installment in Vienna was orchestrated by University of Vienna's philosophy dean Viktor Christian, an influential member of the SS research foundation "Ahnenerbe" who also was member of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. Baumann's colonial mission had some limited success - he managed to initiate a colonial handbook of African tribes with French support, and some of his students and associates engaged in parallel activities (in Vienna as well as in North Africa) that came to a gradual halt, however, after the Wehrmacht's defeat in North Africa under Rommel. At the same time, Viktor Christian built up his SS "research office" for the Middle East and Africa, at first supported by his local museum associate Walter Hirschberg but later also aided by additional staff. Christian's and Hirschberg's role in supplying "expertise" on Himmler's personal request could be investigated and documented for the first time (to be published soon). The prestigious 'Vienna Society for Anthropology' and its journal were integrated into the "Ahnenerbe" under Christian's initiative. These and accompanying activities (such as Vienna academic staff's participation in training police staff to be employed in colonial Africa) show that Völkerkunde was integrated into the Nazi regimes' plans and ambitions to a fairly comprehensive and substantial extent. At the same time, this project successfully analyzed two other spheres of Vienna Völkerkunde hitherto unexplored. First, it managed to provide a first integrative overview of the students' situation, including those who were promoted as well as those who were marginalized and persecuted. In addition, this project analyzed the public outreach activities of Vienna's Völkerkunde representatives, including museum exhibits, popular teaching, and related activities.