Racial Science on Trial: Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Objectivity, and the Politics of Nazi Science

Anna Skarpelis, New York University

What could possibly compel the Nazi Party to put one of its main ideological architects on trial? This paper considers the case of the phenomenologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss – Edmund Husserl’s student, and a man so dedicated to ethnographic research that he lived in Jordan under the assumed identity of a sheik, brownface and all – who saw his illustrious career collapse when his estranged wife accused him of being too friendly with his Jewish collaborator Margarete Landé. Not only was the rampant anti-Semite and one of the main architects behind the Nazi idea of Nordic supremacy found to have violated the Nuremberg Race Laws, but also to have developed his theories in collaboration with the Jewish philosopher Landé. This article studies the ensuing NSDAP (Nazi party) exclusion trial. Drawing for the first time on a previously “lost” file at the German Federal Archive, containing 446 pages of records on the trial, including a transcript of his interrogation by the party that tries to establish what was “good” and what was “bad” racial science, I show how bureaucrats and scientists constructed what they thought constituted “legitimate” forms of racial science. Although Clauss eventually was excluded from the party in 1943 for “going native” and for engaging in research practices considered non-objective, the party begs for his return in 1944, and he joins a group of scientists and journalists as part of the SS propaganda group “Kurt Eggers,” where he is tasked with studying “the enemy” from within. The paper takes how far right ideas about racial hierarchies clash with extant rules of appropriate research protocol, and how the contradictory push and pull of these impulses develop under conditions of total war.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 224. Nazism and the Holocaust