Abstract
The article presents the complicateted world of German anthropology in the twenties and the thirties of the 20th century. The Denkwelt of anthropology in this period is shown as ambiguous, without a unifying idea where more approaches to the study of race and its political application were involved.
German anthropology during the Third Reich era is as a whole often considered to be an exemplary case of ideologically contaminated and politically exploited science. Even common textbooks dealing with the history of anthropology support such viewpoints by bonding together racial ideologies and racial anthropology.
Such oversimplifying attitudes suffer from several inaccuracies. First, the development of anthropological concepts in this period is to be interpreted rather in the context of the history of scientific (in particular biological) theories than of the history of ideologies.
To achieve this, we prefer the contextual rather than the more common diachronic approach for treating this matter.