White men with low moral standards? Germon anthropology and the Herero genocide

Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists be came increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist idea s, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demon strates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, w ere more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.