Lisa Gottschall’s dissertation is a case study on the career of a University of Vienna alumnus. The SS officer Anton A. Plügel (1910–1945), an ethnologist and anthropologist, dedicated his research to the Nazi occupation policy in Eastern Europe. Working in the Polish Generalgouvernement, he conducted field work on the Gorals (sometimes also referred to as Polish Highlanders), a population group living in the Podhale region of the Tatra Mountains. As head of the „Rassen- und Volkstumsforschung“ department at the IDO in Krakow, he was also responsible for an extensive collection of biometric data on the Polish population. Archive records testify to those humiliating examinations that an enormous number of people had to pass.

Lisa Gottschall is a doctoral candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology and a student of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include the History of Science and Holocaust Studies. Extensive archive work took her to Berlin and Krakow. After finishing a further study of Social Work at the FH Campus Vienna in 2011, she became involved in the area of social services for several years. From 2012 to 2017, she was a psycho-social councelor at ESRA, a centre for survivors of Nazi persecution and people with acute or chronic trauma. She is currently working voluntarily as a probation officer at Neustart Vienna.