Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt

Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (10 April 1892 – 20 December 1965) was a German physical anthropologist and an authoritative representative of racial theory under National Socialism. His theory of the division of humanity into three "great races" was still held in anthropology until the 1990s.

Biography

Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt was born on April 10, 1892 in Jersitz, Province of Posen. He came from the old Pomeranian noble family of Eickstedt. He spent his school years in Berlin, Dresden and a boarding school in Halberstadt.

He studied anthropology, medicine, philosophy, psychology, ethnology, geography, history and linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Frankfurt am Main. His encounter with the anthropologist and ethnologist Felix von Luschan in the Berlin years of study from 1913 onwards was formative.

During World War I, von Eickstedt was a medical sergeant. In this capacity, he conducted his first anthropological studies in 1916 on Sikh prisoners of war serving in the British Army. In 1916, he married Enjo da Costa Macedo, a Brazilian woman of Portuguese descent. His POW studies resulted in his 1920 dissertation on the North Indian Sikhs.

In 1921 von Eickstedt became an assistant at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Freiburg under the direction of the anthropologist Eugen Fischer. In 1924, he was appointed head of the Anthropological Department at the Natural History Museum under Otto Reche. In 1926 ,he worked briefly with the anthropologist Theodor Mollison in Munich. In the same year von Eickstedt started his first expedition to India, during which he collected extensive anthropological and ethnological data. In 1927, he was briefly an assistant to the geographer Norbert Krebs in Berlin.

During his time in Vienna, Eickstedt established contacts with the publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann, discussed with him in 1926 the possibility of a "study of Germany" from a racial point of view, and in the same year contributed an "Anthropological-Clinical Measuring Chart" to the publishing program of the J. F. Lehmann Verlag. In 1927, he became editor of the Archiv für Rassenbilder of the same publishing house.

In December 1928, Eickstedt was appointed lecturer in absentia at the Medical Faculty of the University of Breslau. Since he was on a research trip to India, he was granted leave of absence for this purpose until the following summer semester. In the summer of 1929, he habilitated at the Faculty of Philosophy and, as a private lecturer, took over the direction of the new Anthropological Institute as well as the existing Ethnographic Collection as a deputy, and from 1933 as an associate professor. At the university, he gave lectures on topics of racial hygiene or eugenics from 1929 on. Since 1931, National Socialist-minded students and assistants gathered around him. He was considered a "Nazi baron" in the local press. After the National Socialists came to power, he applied for membership in the NSDAP on May 1, 1933, and for a time wore the party badge for membership candidates. His former assistant Walter Jankowsky, himself a member of the NSDAP, succeeded in getting Eickstedt's application for membership rejected with a series of denunciations to NSDAP authorities. This is attributed to personal, not political, reasons.

Nevertheless, Eickstedt rose to become one of the leading race theorists under National Socialism. He was appointed associate professor in 1933 and tenured in 1934. He supported the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933 with an article and, from the summer of 1935, dealt with National Socialist race legislation in his lectures. Until 1944, racial science and current developments in racial politics remained the main topic of his research and teaching activities.

From 1933 onward, he prepared "parentage reports" for the then established Reich Ancestry Office, in which, in the case of disputed paternity of a person, he determined the parentage of "Jews," "half-Jews," or "quarter-Jews" on the basis of the person's external physical characteristics and thus decided on the person's claim to civil rights in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws. From 1936 to 1944, he and his assistants, especially Ilse Schwidetzky, produced an unknown number of such expert opinions, which comprised a large part of their working time. Eickstedt was among 13 anthropologists listed by the Reichssippenamt as experts in racial expert opinions. He participated in a conference in 1939 at which these expert opinions were discussed and their alleged scientific reliability and political indispensability were unanimously affirmed. Thus, from 1933 onwards, Eickstedt's expert opinions decided the professional fate, and from 1941 onwards, under certain circumstances, the life and death of the persons examined, as "half" and "full Jews" were deported to ghettos and labor camps. Schwidetzky's postwar claim that Eickstedt's Breslau Institute had been uninvolved in these expert opinions proved to be false: files on at least eleven of the Institute's expert opinions signed by Eickstedt and Schwidetzky have been preserved, one of them complete.

In 1934, his main work Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit and the shorter Die rassischen Grundlagen des deutschen Volkes were published. In 1935, he founded the Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde und die gesamte Forschung am Menschen. Together with his assistant Ilse Schwidetzky and NSDAP organizations, he conducted a large-scale regional study in Silesia.

From 1937 to 1939, he set out on a second Asian expedition to India, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The results of the two Asian expeditions went into his book Racial Dynamics of East Asia (1944). The revision of Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte grew into a three-volume work that he believed encompassed all of anthropology and was not completed until the 1960s (Die Forschung am Menschen, 1940–1962). Around 1938, von Eickstedt received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sofia. In May 1940, a reassignment of his extraordinary professorship to a full professorship, which he had requested, was rejected because of doubts about Eickstedt's basic political convictions on the part of the Dozentenbund leader, who was then also admonished by the Reich Minister for Science, Education, and National Education in June of that same year.

In 1945, Eickstedt and his wife fled Breslau. Via Dresden they reached Leipzig, where Eickstedt hoped to obtain a professorship at the university. Due to objections both from the works council that he had gained unjustified material advantages, he did not get beyond a lecture on Systematic Anatomy (Bones and Muscles) in the summer semester of 1946. Rather, he was arrested by the Soviet military authorities and was subjected to interrogations for three weeks before being released. However, he escaped internment.

On the initiative and recommendation of Dean and Rector Hans-Georg Gadamer, the University of Leipzig initially hired him in September 1945 at its Faculty of Philosophy as head of the Anthropological Institute. However, since the Saxon state administration did not permit Eickstedt's permanent appointment as full professor of anthropology and anatomy, which the Faculty of Philosophy had applied for in March 1946, and other applications on his part also failed, he resigned as provisional head of the Institute on October 15, 1946, and moved to the newly founded University of Mainz, where he had already been awarded a full professorship on September 29, 1946. In Mainz, ethnology and anthropology were not considered discredited by National Socialism, so he became involved in the establishment of a new Anthropological Institute as full professor and director of the Research Institute for the Study of Man together with his former senior assistant Ilse Schwidetzky. The University of Mainz offered him a chair in anthropology. He was accepted as a member by the newly founded German Society for Sociology (DGS), with DGS chairman Leopold von Wiese personally acting as sponsor. In 1949, Eickstedt re-founded the Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde under the name Homo - Zeitschrift für die vergleichende Biologie des Menschen. In the 1950s and 1960s, von Eickstedt made multiple research trips to Spain, Morocco, and the Middle East. In 1961 his retirement took place. Ilse Schwidetzky became his successor in Mainz and also took over the direction of the journal Homo. Von Eickstedt died in Mainz in 1965 after a heart attack.

Eickstedt's Ausgewählte Lichtbilder zur Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1933) was placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet Occupation Zone, and his Die rassischen Grundlagen des deutschen Volkstums (1941) was placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the German Democratic Republic. However, in the Geschichte der Biologie (History of Biology), published in the GDR in 1985, he is acknowledged as an important anthropologist and racial theorist. Eickstedt's work was published in the GDR.

Eickstedt's theory of the division of mankind into three "great races" was still advocated in popular West German encyclopedias until the 1990s.

Major publications

Monographs

• Die rassischen Grundlagen des deutschen Volkes (1934)
• Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit (1934)
• Grundlagen der Rassenpsychologie (1936)
• Rassendynamik von Ostasien. China und Japan, Tai und Kmer von der Urzeit bis heute (1944)
• Die Forschung am Menschen (1940–1963; 3 volumes)
• Türken, Kurden und Iraner seit dem Altertum. Probleme einer anthropologischen Reise (1961)

Selected essays

• "Rassenelemente der Sikh". In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 52/53 (1920–21), pp. 317–68.
• "Beiträge zur Rassenmorphologie der Weichteilnase". In: Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 25 (1925), pp. 171–220.
• "Die Negritos und das Negritoproblem". In: Anthropologischer Anzeiger 4 (19270), pp. 275–93.
• "Die Negritos der Andamanen". In: Anthropologischer Anzeiger 5 (1928), pp. 251–68.
• "Der Zentral-Dekkan und die Rassengliederung Indiens". In: Anthropologischer Anzeiger 8 (1931), pp. 89–103.
• "Die anthropologische Stellung von Indochina'. In: Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 34 (1934), pp. 79–83.
• "Die Mediterranen in Wales". In: Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 1 (1935), pp. 19–64.
• "Ganzheitsanthropologie". In: Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 3 (1936), pp. 1–10.
• "Hormone und Boden. Die Stellung eines Problems'. In: Landeskundliche Forschung. Festschrift für Norbert Krebs (1936), pp. 67–82.
• "Rassen im schlesischen Raum. Sinn und Ergebnisse der RUS". In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 3 (1939), pp. 424–36.
• 'Wie sahen die Hunnen aus? Eine anthropologisch-historische Untersuchung". In: Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 13 (1942), pp. 217–50.
• "Völkerbiologische Probleme der Sahara. Die Anthropologie der Tuareg und Tebu und die Rassengeschichte der antiken West-Aethiopier'. In: Beiträge zur Kolonialforschung I (1943), pp. 169–240.
• "Biodynamik der Europiden". In: Historia Mundi 1 (1952), pp. 115–34.
• "Rassentypen und Typendynamik von Asien". In: Historia Mundi 1 (1952), pp. 147–66.
• "Der Ursprung der Inder". In: Indien und Deutschland (1956), pp. 48–70.
• "Anthropologie mit und ohne Anthropos". In: Homo 14 (1963), pp. 1–16.

External links

• Works by Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt at German National Library
• Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (1892-1965) at the Wayback Machine (archived March 30, 2013)