ABSTRACT
In July of 1915, the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921) visited a prisoner-of-war camp near Eger, a town two hours northeast of Budapest by train. Pöch and his five assistants arrived carrying anthropometric instruments, equipment to make plaster molds, and several cameras. The men were assigned to an empty medical barrack, which they proceeded to arrange for anthropological investigations, measurements, and photography. 1 The purpose of Pöch's visit was to conduct anthropological studies of the prisoners at Eger and other POW camps, a project for which both the Anthropological Society of Vienna and the Austrian Royal Academy of Science had already provided funding. As Pöch and his team set up their equipment and cameras, they prepared for an element of their future work that particularly excited them: the prospect of creating “racial types” through photography. Pöch's efforts with the camera marked the beginning of a larger wartime project in German anthropology to photograph POWs, an enterprise that promised intriguing new data for the discipline. In the context of total war, however, this supposedly objective undertaking was not simply a “scientific” endeavor; from the outset, racial photographs of the enemy became political, as well as public, documents. By photographing POWs, the anthropologists in the camps not only created and disseminated a “racialized” view of the enemy, but also aided in the construction of a wartime identity for the Central Powers.
