Who is Gretchen E Schafft?

Answer 1

Gretchen Engle Schafft is an anthropologist and author of four books. Her childhood was spent in Grand Rapids, Michigan She graduated from Antioch College in 1961 after spending a year in Germany working in Berlin and Frankfurt/Main and studying at the Johann Goethe Institute in Frankfurt/Main. In 1962, she married Harry Schafft, a physicist at thte National Bureau of Standards and finished her Master's degree in anthropology at American University. Gretchen and Harry were very active in the civil rights movement, and she used that experience to write her dissertation at Cathoiic Univeristy in Anthropology on "White Children as a Minority in a District Public School." This work was based on her own neighborhood experiences and that of her children.

The first part of Gretchen Schafft's career was involved in research and evaluation of government and non-profit programs designed to benefit the poor and minority populations of the U.S. She directed a dozen studies on aging, food security, school integration, and other salient topics. During this period, Schafft wrote her first book with James Cawley on physician assistants.

In 1990, with her children on their own, Gretchen Schafft decided to return to Germany and research Nazi crimes within the concnetration camp system. She worked closely with an East German archivist, Gerhard Zeidler, and they published a book in the German language to help visitors identify specific camp memorials and have a better understanding of what had happened in them. Realizing from this study that anthropologists had been involved in camp atrocities and that German anthropologists had also had widespread involvement in the development and administration of racial policies in the Third Reich, she and Zeidler explored archival records in many towns and cities in Poland, as well as in Germany. They worked at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archive to organize and shelve primary research data from German anthropologists in Poland gahtered in 1942-1944. Schafft then wrote a book in English using these data in 2004 that was translated into Polish by Teresa Uliewicz in 2006.

Schafft and Zeidler continued to pursue research together and in 2011 they published their most recent book, on the concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora in Nordhausen, Germany. This book looked specifically at the camp and its memorializatio in the German Democratic Republid and in the Federal Republic of Germany.

For the last 15 years, Gretcehn Schafft maintained a close tie to American University as a part-time lecturer and then as "Public Anthropologist in Residence." In that capacity, she shared her research and pedagogical approches with many students, developing new classes for graduate students and developing classroom methods that brought anthropological materials and controversies closer to the students. She continues in this capacity.

1987 Schafft, Gretchen. and James Cawley. Physician Assistants in a Changing Health Care Environment. Aspen Systems Corporation. Rockville, Maryland.

1996 Schafft, Gretchen and Gerhard Zeidler. KZ-Mahn- und Gedenkstaetten in Deutschland. Dietz Verlag. Berlin, Germany

2004 Schafft, Gretchen From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. University of Illinois Press. Champaign-Urbanas, Illinois

2006 Translation by Teresa Uliewicz. Od rasizmu do ludoojstwa. Antopologia w Trzeciej w Trzeciej Rzeszy. Wydanichwo Universyetu Jagielonskiego,

2011 Schafft, Gretchen and Gerhard Zeidler. Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora. University of Illinois Press. Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.