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

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.