Abstract. – During World War II in Cracow, in the occupied Poland, the Nazi authorities established the ideologically oriented “Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit.” The institute comprised several sections, one of them being the “Sektion Rassen- und Volkstumforschung.”
The staff of this department undertook racial examinations as well as ethnographic research among the ethnic groups of southern Poland. As a result of this project thousands of anthropological records were collected. After World War II, the collection was taken to the USA but in 2008 it was returned to Poland. Anthropologists from the Jagiellonian University now work on these records, trying to reconstruct the broad context of the Nazi research, including people’s memories. [Poland, Podhale region, Nazi anthropology, race, culture]