Norman Creel, Sophie Ehrhardt, and the legacy of anthropology during the Nazi period

Abstract

Since 1989, the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has given out the Norman Creel Prize For Outstanding Student Research in Anatomical Sciences, named for a late professor in the department whose 1990 obituary hailed him as “one of the major ambassadors linking Europe and the United States.” However, documents obtained from German archives show that while working in Germany the 1960s and 1970s, Norman Creel collaborated in research with Sophie Ehrhardt, a German anthropologist who contributed to the Nazi genocide of the Romani people. Their work used data derived from coercive Nazi research on Romani populations, yielding a 1977 abstract publication in connection with a US anthropological conference. The discovery of these documents provides an example of the postwar use of data from research conducted on human beings during the Nazi period and shows how the long shadow of Nazi science reaches across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, including in the field of anatomical sciences. Creel's work with an unrepentant former Nazi race scientist like Ehrhardt, the unethical nature of that work and the indignity that it inflicted on victims, survivors, and their families raise serious concerns about an academic award being named in his honor.

Settela Steinbach, a 9‐year‐old Dutch Sinti girl often known as “the girl with the headscarf.” Frequently assumed to have been Jewish, she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there in July 1944 (Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain image).

INTRODUCTION: THE ROLE OF MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THE ROMANI GENOCIDE

Although the Nazis' genocide of approximately 6 million Jews during the Holocaust has been the subject of a wide array of books, articles, documentaries, and films, their concurrent genocide of Europe's Roma—in which it is generally accepted that up to 500,000 ¹ or between one‐third and one‐half of the prewar Romani population of the continent were murdered ² —remains largely neglected, frequently treated as a tangential footnote, minimized and downplayed or in some cases denied. ³ Indeed, the West German government only formally acknowledged that the Romani people had been the victims of a racially motivated genocide in 1982. Communist East Germany was relatively quick in recognizing Roma as victims of National Socialism, but policies whose effects were discriminatory toward Roma—such as the requirement to have a permanent address and job to receive a pension, which disadvantaged those involved in traditionally itinerant Romani occupations like traveling entertainers and craftspeople ⁴ —made compensation for survivors difficult, and the racial aspects of the genocide were de‐emphasized amid the more general focus on Nazi crimes. ⁵

A significant factor making the mass murder possible was the scientific research of medical professionals and social scientists working for the Center for Research on Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology, also known by its German acronym (Rassenhygienische und bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle), the RHF. Broadly speaking, such research, rooted in the now‐discredited ideas of eugenics, was part and parcel of the Nazis' obsession with race and heredity and is why Rudolf Hess referred to National Socialism as “applied biology.” However, it also took place at a time when eugenics research still had currency in the medical field worldwide, and even many brutal human experiments conducted during the Nazi period still adhered to a kind of scientific logic, “albeit paired with complete disregard for the suffering of the coerced participants.” ⁶ The work of the RHF contributed directly to the Nazis' persecution and genocide of the Roma. Despite this, not only did the staff members of the RHF go unpunished after the war, but the data from their coercive anthropological research continued to be used to perpetuate racist ideas about Roma in the name of academic research and to enable Romani people's persecution by law enforcement in postwar Germany into the 1970s. ⁷

One of the RHF anthropologists was Sophie Ehrhardt, who worked there from 1938 until she took a faculty position at the Anthropology Institute of the University of Tübingen in 1942, where she remained until her official retirement in 1968. ⁸ In 1966, she began a research collaboration focused on Roma with Norman Creel, a former US serviceman who attended the university and obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in anthropology there. In 1969, he took a position at the Anthropology Institute of the University of Mainz.

In 1972, Creel accepted an academic position in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, where he worked until his death from cancer in 1988. ⁹ In 1989, the Norman Creel Prize for Outstanding Student Research in Anatomical Sciences was created, which the department has awarded to students ever since.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Although the Roma have historically been known as Gypsies, that term is today widely viewed as an ethnic slur, particularly when used by non‐Roma. However, proper alternative terminology varies between countries and contexts. In Germany, the term “Sinti und Roma” is preferred, given that the Romani subgroup native there, the Sinti, have a distinct identity, whereas “Roma” usually refers to subgroups from Southeastern and Eastern Europe. For the purpose of this article, I will use the term “Roma” as that is common in North America and much of Europe, with “Romani” being the adjectival form and terms like “Sinti” being used when necessary to distinguish them from other Romani groups. “Gypsy” and equivalent terms are used only in titles and quotations. The Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma (the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma), a Romani civil rights organization, provides further context on terminology and why the term “Sinti und Roma” is preferred especially in Germany. ¹⁰

SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

The letters and court documents that form the basis of this article were uncovered among documents from German archives, which I translated from German into English during my ongoing research for a book about the Romani genocide under National Socialism and the RHF's role in it. Nearly, all the archival documents came from the Hamburg State Archive, whereas one came from the Ludwigsburg State Archives, part of the State Archives of Baden‐Württemberg. This initially led to an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. ¹¹ Other sources include various academic journal articles and articles from news media. For this article, I examined sources using investigative journalism techniques, including detailed analysis and cross‐comparison of documents and statements by Ehrhardt and Creel.

A LONG HISTORY OF PERSECUTION

The Romani people constitute the largest ethnic minority in Europe, with multiple different subgroups that have differences in terms of language and customs but share an ethnic identity and many cultural practices. These include the Sinti of Germany and surrounding areas, the Roma of the eastern parts of Europe, the Romanichals of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Spanish Kale, whose name means “black” in the Romani language, which itself is an Indic language descended from Sanskrit. ¹² While some subgroups have traditionally been itinerant, others have long been settled.

The ancestors of the Roma originated in India and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, migrated westward, arriving in the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century. All the while, they have maintained their distinct ethnic identity and complex system of rules governing interactions with gadje, or non‐Roma. ¹³ Because of discrimination that kept them out of different professions, Roma came to specialize in certain trades and occupations, many of which they are still associated with today. ¹⁴ Still, almost from the beginning, Roma faced relentless persecution and mistreatment. This included chattel slavery in much of what is today Romania and certain other parts of Europe as well as the Americas, where Roma have lived for hundreds of years. ¹³

Persecution of Roma peaked under National Socialism and as the Nazi regime launched its wars of aggression against other European nations. In June 1936, as the Berlin Olympics approached, Justice Minister Wilhelm Frick issued the “Combating the Gypsy Plague” decree calling for greater police control over Roma and established a camp in the district of Marzahn, into which police initially forced 600 Romani men, women and children from around the Berlin area. Eventually, 1200 were made to live at Marzahn, where they were subjected to forced labor, and poor conditions led to the rapid spread of disease. ¹⁵ On December 8, 1938, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree that officially declared the regime's policies toward Roma to be based on race and called for the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA), or Reich Criminal Police Office, to register Roma living in the Reich. ¹⁶

The Nazis conducted their extermination campaign against the Roma similarly to the one against the Jews, with Roma shipped to extermination camps like Auschwitz‐Birkenau, Bełżec, and Treblinka or shot and buried in mass graves by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. On January 29, 1943, the Reich Ministry of the Interior issued Himmler's so‐called Auschwitz Decree, which ordered the mass deportation of Roma to the eponymous camp, where, of 23,000 Romani prisoners, 21,000 were murdered, including in the gas chambers. ¹ Many of the victims were young children. ¹⁷

Although a Romani middle class had developed in prewar Europe, including Germany, the genocide decimated it, leaving few who were socioeconomically equipped to advocate for the interests of Roma after the war. ¹⁸ Indeed, nobody was called to testify on behalf of Roma during the Nuremberg trials. ¹³ Meanwhile, most of the perpetrators went unpunished and after the war took positions of influence in areas, such as academia and law enforcement. This, together with continued racial prejudice against Roma, has contributed to the relative lack of attention that the genocide has received.

Roma throughout Europe continue to face rampant racist hate speech, discrimination and violence at the hands of fellow citizens and government authorities alike, with the problem being especially acute in the former communist bloc nations and countries like Italy. ¹⁹

THE CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON RACIAL HYGIENE AND DEMOGRAPHIC BIOLOGY, RHF

Although the RKPA registered Roma, particularly within Germany, the task of collecting the information that served as the basis for registering Roma went to the RHF, which was founded in 1936 under the Reich Health Office. In 1938, under Himmler's decree, the RHF began the process of collecting information on everyone in Germany who was Romani or had Romani ancestry. Led by psychiatrist Robert Ritter and his chief assistant, the nurse Eva Justin, along with anthropologist Sophie Ehrhardt and other staff members, the RHF traveled all over Germany, manipulating Roma by speaking to them in the Romani language or offering them money or sweets so that they would divulge family histories and allow the researchers to examine their phenotypic traits. Often, especially if they did not cooperate, the RHF staff would resort to verbal and physical abuse. In a 1986 interview, survivor Hugo Franz told prosecutors that Ruth Kellermann, a staff member for the RHF who later worked for the center on a freelance basis, slapped his mother to the point where her face became red and swollen, while he and his brothers were threatened with being sent to a concentration camp if they left Hamburg. ²⁰ In 1985, as Kellermann was giving a series of lectures at the women's studies department at the University of Hamburg, survivor Giovanna Steinbach approached the lectern, accused Kellermann of having her family sent to the camps and spat in her face. ²¹

The genealogies that the RHF drew up were so extensive that they even uncovered people who ended up deported to Auschwitz based on Romani heritage they had not known about. Such victims included Luise Liselotte Wolf, whose father was, unbeknownst to her and her siblings, of Romani heritage, and declared so by the RHF. In January 1943, when she was 5 months pregnant with the child of her boyfriend, a German Wehrmacht soldier, she was made to sign a consent form agreeing to an abortion and sterilization as a condition for being allowed to marry him. When he deserted and sought shelter with Wolf's sister, RKPA officer and SS member Hans Maly ordered Wolf's “preventive detention” and deportation to Auschwitz, where she arrived heavily pregnant in late March and died in early May, supposedly of diarrhea. ²² In other cases, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, some of them decorated, found themselves deported to Auschwitz based on distant Romani ancestry. ²³

The RHF also created tens of thousands of reports with the header Gutachtliche Äußerung, or “expert opinion,” which assigned their subjects “racial diagnoses” like “Z” (for Zigeuner, meaning “Gypsy”) or “ZM” (for Zigeunermischling, meaning “Gypsy half‐breed”) with equal or predominant German or Romani ancestry, or “NZ” (Nichtzigeuner) if they were people not of Romani ancestry, such as Germans with Romani spouses. ²⁴ The RHF would turn these reports over to the RKPA—and in particular to a division of the RKPA called the “Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Nuisance” (Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens)—to enable the apprehension, forced sterilization, or deportation to a camp of the individuals named therein. ²⁵ The reports would often include notes about their subjects. One example is from August 30, 1941, with Ritter's signature. It is for a woman with her name redacted who received the “racial diagnosis” of “Gypsy (‘Roma’ from Hungary) Gelderari”—referring to the Romani subgroup to which she belonged—and is marked “Evak.,” or “evacuated,” meaning deported to a concentration camp and likely murdered. ²⁶

Of the more than 20,000 such reports that the RHF issued, some, like the aforementioned, have been found at police departments, most bearing Ritter's signature, along with several signed by Justin and at least one signed by Ehrhardt. ²⁷ But apart from those few that have turned up, the vast majority of the reports disappeared after the war. ²⁸ In the postwar years, Ehrhardt inherited many of the RHF's materials, together with the Landau in der Pfalz‐based physician Hermann Arnold, who used them to write research papers that perpetuated racist stereotypes about Roma. He also used the materials to try and rehabilitate the reputations of Ritter and Justin—even citing Ritter as a source in publications ²⁹ —and position himself as an “expert” on Romani affairs for various German federal agencies and in compensation proceedings, usually to the detriment of Roma themselves. ³⁰ Arnold had apparently obtained his share of the materials from Justin, who had obtained them from Ritter. ³¹ Arnold was born in 1912 and earned his medical degree in 1937 with a dissertation about chemical warfare. The Central Council of German Sinti of Roma accused him of having taken part in the RHF's research on Sinti during the Nazi period but was unable to prove this in court. ³²

NORMAN CREEL AND SOPHIE EHRHARDT'S COLLABORATION

Norman Creel and Sophie Ehrhardt began working together in 1966, when he was studying anthropology at the university. Born in 1935 in McComb, Mississippi, Creel was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who studied at the University of Tübingen due to its greater affordability compared to studies in the United States and his fluency in German. ³³ Initially, Creel studied geology and paleontology, but began studying anthropology after getting a job in the university's Anthropological Institute cleaning and restoring excavated human skeletal remains. ⁹ Ehrhardt was born in Kazan, Russia, in 1902 to a Baltic German family and grew up in Tartu, Estonia. She studied zoology at the University of Tartu, receiving her master's degree in 1927. She then went to the University of Munich to study anthropology, obtaining her doctorate in 1930 and working in the statistics department of the university's anthropology institute until 1935, when she was appointed as an assistant at the Institute for Racial Studies, Population Biology, and Rural Sociology, where she worked until 1938. She worked at the RHF from 1938 until 1942, when she began working at the University of Tübingen's Anthropological Institute—known until the end of the war as the Institute for Racial Biology—where she worked as a researcher, lecturer and supervisor of doctoral students in various anthropology‐related fields until her retirement. ³⁴ Her work to bolster the Nazi state's racial ideology played a direct role in her getting that job as well. In a December 23, 1941 letter, the head of the university's Institute for Racial Biology wrote to the rector that the institute “would gain a very good employee for the practical processing of the reports on Jews and Gypsies that are constantly sent to us” by state agencies and praised as “particularly noteworthy” Ehrhardt's research on Roma and Jews in Łódź, site of one of the largest ghettos in German‐occupied Poland. ³⁵

By the time Creel and Ehrhardt began working together, the activities of the RHF had already been thrust into the national spotlight in Germany. On April 23, 1963, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel printed a long article that detailed the suffering of the Roma during the Nazi era and the frustrated efforts of survivors to get compensation from the West German government. However, buried deep in the article was a part that ignited a national scandal, naming two individuals—Ritter and Justin—who had gone on to live normal and even prosperous lives after the war. Ritter had gone back to his job as a physician before his death in 1951. ³⁶ Justin had earned her doctorate during the war with a blatantly racist thesis focusing on a group of Romani children taken from their parents to live in a Catholic children's home who were later deported to Auschwitz and mostly gassed. ¹⁷ After the war, she worked as a psychologist for the municipal health department in Frankfurt, including with Romani families. Subsequent media reports alleging that Justin abused Roma led to an official investigation and exhaustive media coverage of her wartime activities, including in the national newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), though the investigation was ultimately dropped. ³⁷ She died of cancer in 1966.

Although it is possible that Creel did not read Der Spiegel or the FAZ and did not know of the investigation into Justin, he nevertheless appeared to have few if any qualms about collaborating on research into Roma with one of Justin's colleagues, who shared with Justin culpability in the genocide of the Romani people. Later statements he made to prosecutors made it clear that he was aware of the historical context of the research materials and of how widespread white supremacist views were among anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 20th century. ³³

“[In] the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology in Europe and the United States was not free from the underlying belief in the superiority of the white race,” Creel told the prosecutors. “However, I did not notice any such attitude toward the Gypsies in Ms. Ehrhardt's work. She seemed to show them understanding for their unique characteristics and way of life.”

In a June 12, 1968 letter under Ehrhardt's letterhead, Creel wrote to Arnold that although he and Ehrhardt had not yet published anything, “our work is progressing quite well” and that although he was unable to travel to Landau to meet with Arnold, “it would certainly be interesting to make the acquaintance of these Gypsies.” ³⁸

By early 1970, Ehrhardt wrote to Arnold, “You'll probably know that Dr. Creel, who has moved to Mainz, and I are nearing completion of our Gypsy work. We hope to have the work completed by this fall.” She noted that “the largest and most important part of the entire Gypsy material”—meaning the index cards and other documentation from the RHF that Ehrhardt had been keeping at the Anthropological Institute of the University of Tübingen—had gone with Creel to Mainz, and “we have now come to the conclusion that it would be best if the remainder were also brought to Mainz, so that all the material could be deposited there,” while a colleague “has agreed to this material being stored at your institute. I have informed Dr. Würth, and I assume your consent, given that Landau is not far from Mainz.” “Dr. Würth” referred to Adolf Würth, who had worked at the RHF until his conscription into the Wehrmacht in 1940. ³⁹

Overall, the collaboration between Ehrhardt and Creel yielded little in the way of publications. Nevertheless, publication was clearly the ultimate goal. In a May 12, 1973 letter, Ehrhardt stated that she and Creel intended to publish their work in a special issue of the journal HOMO. ⁴⁰ Although under criminal investigation in connection with her activities during the Nazi period, Ehrhardt told prosecutors that the two had submitted a manuscript to the German Research Foundation in September 1974, but that it was “inexplicably” lost. The case was ultimately dropped in 1985. ⁴¹ In a letter from July 19, 1973, when Creel had already relocated to Stony Brook, Ehrhardt wrote to Arnold that “A solution will surely be found for the publication of Creel's and my Gypsy work.” She added that “At the end of August, I will receive news from Professor Preuschoft, a colleague of mine, about the outcome of his discussion with Creel in New York.” ⁴² Three months before, Arnold had written to Ehrhardt that “Frankly, I fear the work will never be finished.” ⁴³

However, Creel and Ehrhardt's efforts were not entirely fruitless. They did manage to publish an abstract in connection with the 1977 meeting in Seattle of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and today known as the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. The abstract, an analysis of fingerprints, included data from “859 male German Gypsies,” meaning that 5 years into his employment at Stony Brook University, Creel had been directly involved in research and a publication that used materials and data that had played a role in the genocide of the Romani people. ⁴⁴ Ehrhardt wrote in a May 12, 1973 letter to Walther Klofat at the German Research Foundation that she had “personally worked on the fingerprinting section of the three major Gypsy groups, with comparisons with other Gypsy groups in Europe and outside of Europe, as well as comparisons with non‐Gypsies”—apparently the same data contained in the 1977 abstract and which Creel and Ehrhardt had originally intended to include in a larger study based on the RHF research materials. ⁴⁵ An April 19, 1973 letter from Klofat to Ehrhardt also notes that Creel carried out the statistical work for the study using punch cards. ⁴⁶ It is unclear whether Creel attended the 1977 meeting or gave an oral presentation of the abstract, but the same issue of the association's flagship journal lists him as a member. ⁴⁷ An analysis of membership lists included in proceedings of the 1972–1988 annual meetings of the American Association of Anatomists (today the American Association for Anatomy) in the group's flagship journal, The Anatomical Record, indicates that Creel was not a member of the organization. ⁴⁸ Creel nevertheless did contribute to anatomical scholarship, publishing an abstract about human evolution, and early hominids in the April 1986 issue of the same journal for the annual meeting of the Southern Society of Anatomists. ⁴⁹

In an August 27, 1980 letter to the Federal Archive in Koblenz, Ehrhardt referred to the “current processing” of the material “by Prof. Dr. Creel and myself.” ⁵⁰ However, when prosecutors in the Ehrhardt case interviewed Creel at the German consulate in New York in September 1985, he claimed that he had not dealt with the files in more than 15 years. ³³ The 1977 abstract and Ehrhardt's 1980 remark about Creel's “current processing” of the research material make this claim misleading, if not false, as the very existence of the abstract in particular means that at least as recently as 8 years prior to the interview, he was still working with Nazi‐era data on Roma, regardless of whether that meant he was working with the original RHF files or data from them. However, neither the abstract nor Ehrhardt's August 1980 letter came up in the interview.

Ehrhardt also cited an article by Creel about Neolithic skulls in her own 1969 article in HOMO titled Zigeunerschädel, or “Gypsy Skull,” which, as the title suggests, consists of an analysis of the skulls of 47 Romani men and 10 Romani women, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe. Ehrhardt obtained the skulls, which generally dated back to the 1800s or early 1900s, from various museums and institutions around Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe. ⁵¹ Presumably, the skulls in Ehrhardt's sample were obtained through what would be by today's standards morally dubious or criminal means. In the 19th century, it was common for anthropological researchers to procure human remains by robbing graves, particularly those of the poor and marginalized. Human remains have also come from colonized indigenous peoples, which has led to the rise of calls to search present‐day collections for those as well as remains of World War II‐era victims. ⁶ A particularly egregious example is the Mecklenburg Expedition of 1907, in which Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg led a group of explorers, including anthropologist Jan Czekanowski, to East Africa, particularly modern‐day Tanzania and Rwanda. Traditional funerary customs at the time often involved leaving the dead exposed rather than burying them, allowing Czekanowski to simply steal human remains and ship boxes of human skulls to Berlin. ⁵² In 2021, the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology issued an apology for the possession of human skulls as part of the Morton Cranial Collection, named for Samuel Morton, a 19th century Philadelphia scientist sometimes called the “Father of Scientific Racism.” In particular, the collection includes about a dozen skulls of poor African‐Americans dug up in a potter's field in Philadelphia and more than 50 from a graveyard of Black slaves in Cuba. Morton mostly obtained the skulls from grave robbers. ⁵³

In Zigeunerschädel, Ehrhardt wrote that one researcher from mid‐1800s Vienna in possession of several of the skulls she used “knew several of the deceased Gypsies by name.” Although the means by which the skulls were originally procured is unknown, desecration and robbing of Romani people's graves cannot be ruled out.

Indeed, Ehrhardt's wartime and postwar scholarly works alike are rife with racist attitudes toward Roma, in addition to the fact that she continued to base it on Nazi‐era research materials that had been used to send thousands of men, women, and children to their deaths. A 1956 paper on interdigital whorls began by noting that large whorl patterns are typically found among lower primates, whereas loop patterns are more frequent in humans and apes, a rather unnecessary side note to make in the opening paragraph of a paper that is supposed to be about human anatomy. She went on to claim that whorl patterns are disproportionately common among Roma and Jews, which she attributed to “inbreeding” among both groups. ⁵⁴ In a 1942 article, she wrote, “The Gypsies are a primitive people, primitive in their actions and their aspirations.” ⁵⁵ When a public radio journalist confronted Ehrhardt about this statement in September 1981—amid the occupation of the University of Tübingen archives by Sinti activists, including survivors of the Romani Holocaust, to pressure the handover of the RHF materials to the Federal Archives ⁵⁶ —she reportedly said she still maintained this belief as she regarded it as “scientific.” ⁵⁷

In his interview at the German consulate, Creel said of Ehrhardt, “I never noticed any fear or unease in her, nor any feelings of guilt. During our collaboration, she never made any racist remarks. However, I must say that she was somehow attached to that period and seemed to enjoy reminiscing about it; her main concern was the completion of her research from that time.” ³³

Given the mismatch between Ehrhardt's indisputably racist scholarly and public statements and Creel's assertion that she never made any racist remarks, it is possible and even likely that she did say things that were racist, even if Creel did not recognize them as such. But Creel could not claim to have been unaware of the nature of Ehrhardt's research, as he also said, “I do know that some of the cards contained photographs of Gypsies in penal institutions. I remember the name of the Dachau concentration camp in this context.” ³³ Although he stated that there was nothing in the documents suggesting that the RHF “was involved in any activities related to the later extermination of the Gypsies,” he nevertheless conceded that “it is possible that the research findings could have been misused.” ³³ By 1985, it was long since not merely “possible,” but a matter of public record that the RHF's research had laid the groundwork for mass murder.

Creel's answer when asked about Hermann Arnold also calls Creel's credibility into question: “The name Professor Arnold sounds familiar; I believe he is a doctor in Landau, and I have spoken to him once. However, I did not discuss the issues at hand with him.” ³³ Creel's 1968 letter to Arnold, of course, shows that it is flatly untrue that they “did not discuss the issues at hand,” and the letter displays a friendlier, more familiar tone than the fleeting, superficial interaction between the two that Creel describes. A May 30, 1969 letter to Creel carries a similarly friendly tone as Arnold muses about where would be a good place to store “our material.” ⁵⁸ With Creel on vacation, Ehrhardt responded to the letter on his behalf on June 12, 1969, extending “friendly greetings” from him. ⁵⁹

Furthermore, in an April 1982 statement to the state public prosecutor in Stuttgart, University of Mainz anthropology professor Wolfram Bernhard wrote that Arnold had brought genealogical material about Roma to the university “with the aim of having it analyzed by Dr. Creel as part of a planned publication.” ⁶⁰

DISCUSSION

Many universities in the United States have recently had to grapple with their past ties to slavery and also with buildings, statues and other memorials to historical figures whose racist beliefs and actions have come under scrutiny, especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and greater attention to police brutality against Black people. Several Ivy League universities—including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia—and many universities in the South were founded using profits from slavery, while slaves also built Georgetown University. ⁶¹ In 2017, Yale University's Calhoun College was renamed in honor of computer scientist Grace Hopper due to the passionate support for slavery and white supremacy of its original namesake, early 19th century vice president John C. Calhoun. ⁶² In 2020, Princeton University removed the name of Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school over the former president's discrimination against African‐Americans and support for segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. ⁶³

Academic awards created to honor scholars seen as making significant contributions to various fields have also been renamed when it is determined that their namesakes' transgressions outweigh whatever good they might have done, including within the anatomical sciences field. A notable example is the revelation of the Nazi past of German anatomist Wolfgang Bargmann, which ultimately led Germany's Anatomische Gesellschaft to rename the Wolfgang Bargmann Preis, given to students for excellent doctoral theses. ⁶⁴ Another example comes from the United States, where in 2013, the Space Medicine Association retired ⁶⁵ its prestigious Hubertus Strughold Award following the publication in 2012 of an article in The Wall Street Journal about controversy within the field over having a prize named for Strughold, regarded as playing a foundational role in space medicine, but who was also alleged to have taken part in grisly human experiments at Dachau. ⁶⁶

To be sure, there is no evidence that Norman Creel was a Nazi sympathizer or an overt racist, and most of his scholarship focused on areas like primatology and biological anthropology. ⁶⁷ However, his research collaboration with an individual who played a key role in the Nazi genocide of the Romani people and their use of source material that directly contributed to the genocide and that was designed to lend credence to the National Socialist belief that Roma were biologically inferior to “Aryans” constitutes a significant ethical breach that cannot be attributed to mere naivety or oversight or shrugged off as a product of a different time.

Nor was Ehrhardt and Creel's conduct unique, even in the field of anthropology. In the November 21, 1985 dismissal of the case against Ehrhardt, the prosecutor solicited as an expert witness Hans Jürgens, an anthropologist from the University of Kiel whose own family was persecuted by the Nazis, though it is not explained how. In addition to admitting he had never seen the RHF's reports, Jürgens sought to deny anthropologists' role in the Romani Holocaust and rationalize the racial research of the RHF as being common in the modern era. He stated he had been part of a study in the 1960s of Finnish Saami whose health issues “were essentially due to inbreeding effects caused by the isolation of these populations”—racist language similar to that of Ehrhardt's 1956 article. ⁶⁸ It turns out that such language was no accident. In appealing the case dismissal, the attorney for the Association of German Sinti, which had brought the case, revealed that in his scholarship, Jürgens frequently cited Nazi‐era anthropological and race science works “in a manner that raises the question of the necessary distance from the works of that time” and “casts serious doubt on his role as an expert witness in a Nazi trial.” ⁶⁹

Even when it yields results that can benefit humanity, the use of scientific data gained during the Nazi period and especially from experiments conducted on nonconsenting human beings presents a significant ethical minefield, particularly because of its harm to the dignity of victims of Nazi atrocities and the potential to traumatize survivors and their families. Indeed, modern bioethics arguably developed largely in response to the World War II experience. ⁶ One 2024 study concluded that certain uses of Nazi research data can be ethically sound, but that “The research aims should be substantial and beneficial for life‐threatening diseases or conditions, e.g., these data should not be used to develop cosmetic products or associated with lower priority studies.” ⁷⁰ However, the research Creel and Ehrhardt conducted is unlikely to meet such standards.

Ehrhardt and Creel's research is made even more questionable by how it dovetails with a decades‐long history of science and medical researchers using data collected from Roma in a coercive manner. A 2021 op‐ed in Nature documented how European researchers have often obtained those data, including DNA samples, with inadequate or no consent and gone on to share it with other researchers in ways that violate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other research regulations. In many cases, the researchers published papers on Romani people's genetics that referred to them as a “genetic high‐risk group” and “inbred,” language that again echoes Ehrhardt's 1956 article and Jürgens' testimony. Other sources have continued referring to Roma as “Gypsies” even decades after that term came to be seen as pejorative. ⁷¹

Official attitudes toward Roma rooted in scientific racism also persisted in many parts of postwar Europe, including years into Creel's time on the continent and beyond. In Sweden, some 60,000 Romani women were forcibly sterilized between 1935 and 1976, often on the basis of “unmistakable Gypsy features, psychopathy, vagabond life.” ⁷² Similar policies existed in the former Czechoslovakia. ⁷³ In some European countries, it remains a common belief that issues such as mental health problems among Romani are due to genetic factors rather than arising from causes such as trauma and prenatal alcohol exposure, leading to denial of mental health services. ⁷⁴

Finally, it must be said that widespread ignorance of and inattention to the Romani Holocaust, especially in the United States, may have contributed to Ehrhardt and Creel's conduct going unnoticed for so long. Although antisemitism was central to the National Socialist ideology in a way that anti‐Roma racism was not, and the Nazis gave the extermination of the Jews top priority, the Roma were also singled out for wholesale extermination through both forced sterilization and mass murder on the basis of race and the idea that their very existence posed a biological danger to so‐called “Aryans,” and they were the only major ethnic or so‐called racial group apart from the Jews so targeted. ⁶

While discussions about National Socialism and the Holocaust in various media about the 1933–1945 Nazi regime understandably emphasize the Jewish experience, Romani victims, when they are mentioned, are frequently shunted into a broad category of “other victims” alongside groups that were persecuted but not singled out for mass extermination based on race or ethnicity. It is still common to see the famous film footage of Settela Steinbach, also known as "the girl with the headscarf," presented in a way implying she was Jewish, even though she was in fact Sinti and murdered at Auschwitz at age 9 in July 1944. ⁷⁵ This recently occurred in the BBC miniseries Mengele: Unveiled, though to the BBC's credit, the miniseries described at length how Josef Mengele began his work at Auschwitz in the so‐called "Gypsy Family Camp." ⁷⁶

CONCLUSION

The 1990 obituary for Creel in the journal Folia Primatologica hailed his contributions to primatology and biological anthropology, calling him “one of their major ambassadors linking Europe and the United States.” ⁹ But although the obituary—by Creel's longtime friend, Holger Preuschoft—briefly mentioned his studies under “S. Ehrhardt,” it did not mention how “linking Europe and the United States” included importing the legacies of Nazi science into the United States.

Ehrhardt herself belongs in the category of what Hannah Arendt famously called “desk murderers” ⁷⁷ —those in the Nazi bureaucracy who did not personally take human lives, but knowingly enabled mass murder through their work. Creel's collaboration with Ehrhardt and their continued use of Nazi‐era data that she had helped collect is no small misstep. Rather, it is a significant ethical breach that perpetuated the harm caused by coercive anthropological research during the Nazi era, which inflicted great suffering—even after the war—on victims, survivors and their families. Furthermore, the record indicates Creel was likely aware of the nature of the materials he was using—it would take a remarkable level of naivety for him not to have at least some inkling—but did not indicate any remorse or reservations on his part. Although the output from their collaboration was limited in terms of publications, merely conducting the research they did showed intent on their part and lent the illusion of legitimacy to the scientific data collected during the Nazi period. In addition, Creel made what appear to be false or misleading and thus potentially perjurious statements to German prosecutors when questioned about his relationship with Ehrhardt.

CALL TO ACTION

Given recent political attacks on science, and on medical science in particular, it is of the utmost importance to encourage research by rewarding efforts to contribute to scientific knowledge. As such, it is certainly worthwhile to give academic awards for student research.

Moreover, none of this is to downplay Creel's contributions in the field of anatomical sciences or their importance. But just as Bargmann and Strughold's past transgressions resulted in awards named in their honor being renamed, and Jürgens' continued use of Nazi science in the postwar era cast doubt on his credibility, so too must Creel's collaboration with an unrepentant former Nazi race scientist, unethical use of Nazi data and possible perjury when questioned about his activities disqualify him from the honor of having his name grace a prestigious academic prize. Roma have long struggled for recognition as victims of genocide under National Socialism, and it only adds insult to injury for an award to be named for someone who profited from their suffering. Therefore, Stony Brook University should remove Norman Creel's name from the award.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Alaric DeArment: Conceptualization; investigation; writing – original draft; methodology; validation; formal analysis; project administration; data curation.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

Alaric DeArment discloses receiving payments from The New Republic and The Chronicle of Higher Education for freelance articles about Roma, including the subject of this article. He is also currently in the process of researching and writing a book about the role of medical professionals, social scientists and bureaucrats in the Nazi genocide of the Roma. He further discloses employment with Citeline as a reporter covering the biopharmaceutical industry, but he does not receive any compensation from the companies he covers, and his work there is unrelated to this article.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.