Hella Poch

Hella Pöch (born Helene Schürer von Waldheim ; * May 24, 1893 in Wildalpen , Austria-Hungary , † 1976 in Vienna ) was an Austrian anthropologist who was strongly committed to Nazi racial theory .

Life

The talented daughter of the doctor Friedrich Schürer von Waldheim published as a schoolgirl and studied anthropology, ethnography and prehistory at the University of Vienna from 1915 until her doctorate in 1919. She then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Ethnography and Anthropology under Rudolf Pöch , who she had previously married had, but died unexpectedly in 1921. Together with Josef Weninger , she continued teaching on a voluntary basis until 1924. From 1923 to 1945 she was, like her father, a committee member of the Anthropological Society in Vienna .

Her dissertation was based on her surveys in the Grödig prisoner of war camp , which the student carried out on 700 Ukrainian and Volhyn women and children in 1917 . In doing so, she researched the heritability of certain facial features. As a result, she brought the “soft parts of the face” and the papillary lines of the hand into a racial schema. In 1924 she left the institute that Otto Reche had taken over. She married the doctor in the health department and nephew of her first husband Georg Pöch from Salzburg a second time . There she organized a joint meeting of the Anthropological Society in Vienna and the German Society for Physical Anthropology in 1926 . More and more she followed the racist heredity and called Wolhynians as an Asian, "inferior race". In 1929 she measured hundreds of residents in Pongau in order to prove the "Nordic" character of her "race". She followed her husband to Burgenland in the 1930s , where she practiced “racial studies of the Jews”. From 1934 until the annexation of Austria in 1938, she often traveled to Germany in order to maintain contacts with the racial political office of the NSDAP .

In 1938 she was appointed "race expert", who judged very restrictively. She worked closely with Kurt Mayer . In January 1940, Pöch (Vienna) and Sophie Ehrhardt (Tübingen) collected the handprints of Jews on behalf of the Reich Health Office in Lodz . In Tübingen she analyzed material for Hans Fleischhacker . Also in 1940, together with her husband, she proposed an investigation of Sephardic Jews in the Dutch concentration camp Ommen , which was approved in 1941 but could no longer be carried out because of the evacuation.

The Pochs left Salzburg in 1946 and came to Sumbawa Besar in Indonesia in 1954 , where they continued their research. Between 1964 and 1970 she returned to Vienna, where she died in 1976 and was buried in the grave of honor of her first husband Rudolf Pöch at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

Single receipts

1. ↑ In Fleischhacker's hands. In: TAZ. May 13, 2015.

Fonts

• Anthropological and hereditary studies on Volhyn refugee families. Dissertation . Vienna 1919.
• Contribution to the knowledge of the fossil human finds of Lagoa Santa (Brazil) and Fontezuelas (Argentina). Vienna 1938.
• About the Ethiopid and Gondid races and their distribution. 1957. [1]

literature

• Brigitte Fuchs: Hella Pöch. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 587-589.
• Brigitte Fuchs: "Race", "People", Gender: Anthropological Discourses in Austria. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2003, ISBN 3-593-37249-5 .
• Peter Levenda: The Hitler Legacy: The Nazi Cult in Diaspora, How it was Organized, How it was Funded, and Why it remains a Threat to Global Security in the Age of Terrorism. Ibis Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-89254-210-9 .

Web links

• Salzburg Museum