ABSTRACT
Face and death masks have a long tradition in various historical and cultural contexts. Death masks of renowned individuals can be seen on display in museums, libraries, archives and elsewhere. In physical anthropology, casts of head and body parts have a different meaning. The tradition of taking and studying face and death masks in medical, ethnographic and physiognomic studies dates back to the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on two collections of masks of the Nazi period, one collection of 29 plaster death masks of Jewish concentration camp victims and one collection of 19 face masks taken in the course of an anthropological study of Jews temporarily interned in the Vienna Stadium in 1939. Two exhibitions carried out by the Jewish Museum in Vienna initiated further exploration and internal and external historical investigation of the collections. Many physical anthropological collections contain human remains that were collected in the course of "racial studies" from among indigenous peoples worldwide.
