“The most ideal form of scientific collaboration”: Applied racial psychology at the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit in Kraków (1942)

In August 1942, anthropologist Elfriede Fliethmann and psychologist Ferdinand Carspecken tried various standardized psychological tests during a field examination in the Southern Polish town of Witów. Sources suggest that subsequent studies were intended to provide a “scientific” justification for the regime’s ethnic reorganization plans, similarly to a study in the Reichsgau Wartheland by psychologist Rudolf Hippius in the same summer. By employing a comparative mode of enquiry, the case study presented here gives a rare insight into then newly established scientific field: on the interface between anthropology and psychology, the concept of Rassenpsychologie (racial psychology) aimed to close the proclaimed gap between the natural sciences and humanities. Due to its fundamental conception the field was thus predestined to serve the Nazi regime. Investigating specific research practices of the (junior) scientists involved helps us under- stand further development of the concept of race, and thus the foundation of National Socialist ideology.