Landauer House converted into a Nazi biometric centre

Landauer House converted into a Nazi biometric centre marks the violent reversal of a private modernist home into an institution for racial classification. The transformation reaches into the house’s most distinctive spaces: the Glass Room becomes a measuring and photographic chamber, the kitchen a laboratory, and the garage a data-processing workshop. In place of domestic life, the centre installs a system that records human bodies and identities in the name of science, while the machinery and files eventually leave for a more murderous destination.

Seizure and Reorganization

The conversion begins with the arrival of lorries and the installation of the institution’s official identity. Men unload chairs, shelving, desks, and filing cabinets; a wooden guard hut goes up inside the gate, and soldiers erect a metal sign crowned by a wreathed Hakenkreuz. It names the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt and its Forschungsstätte für Biologie. A threshold once belonging to a family home is thus marked as the entrance to a Nazi research site.

The house is reorganized room by room. Upstairs rooms become offices, the kitchens are converted into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. The former photographic darkroom remains in use, while curtains divide the Glass Room into sections. Its open interior is fitted with anthropometric equipment: scales, a height-measuring stand, callipers, and a steel-ruler apparatus mounted above a chair. The onyx wall becomes a backdrop for measurement; the curve of the dining area is dressed as a photographic studio, with lights and a Rolleiflex camera on a tripod. Only the Bösendorfer piano persists as an incongruous remainder of the house’s earlier life. Its tones are restored by a Jewish piano tuner, even as the building is being remade for Nazi racial inquiry.

The garage undergoes a parallel conversion from space for two Landauer motor cars to a machine room. Workers unpack large steel-and-Bakelite devices bearing the manufacturer’s brass nameplates. Among them are a machine resembling a mangle and a typewriter-like apparatus on the scale of an upright piano. Their hum and smell of ink and ozone give the former garage the character of a newspaper print shop. Soldiers bring in boxes of files collected in Vienna, making the building not simply a place for examining people but a centre for processing accumulated records.

The Examination System

The centre’s subjects arrive by bus, in small groups of about a dozen, divided by sex and roughly by age. Their passage through the gate is presented as orderly and polite rather than as an overt military roundup: staff indicate where to go, speaking Czech or German as needed. The calm procedure is itself part of the institution’s presentation of its work as respectable scientific practice.

At reception, staff record each subject’s date and place of birth, languages, religion, race, and nation, as well as disease and family-history details that include conditions, alcoholism, criminality, and mental retardation. Subjects carry their files into a library area for tests involving shapes, sequences, and patterns, then change into medical gowns. A needle prick establishes blood groups, and a sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure. The personal file follows each person through the examination, turning biography as well as the body into data.

The measuring process makes exactness its governing ritual. Staff work in pairs, one positioning the subject and the other recording measurements. The subject is aligned against a stadiometer, then measured for height, hip and chest diameter, and the lengths of limbs. A chair and callipers are used for head dimensions. Skin colour is matched against a von Luschan chart, while eye colour is compared with rows of model eyes. The repeated adjustments are meant to standardize each examination, as though precision could remove the human judgement embedded in the procedure.

Photography completes the process. Subjects are told to remove their gowns for pictures, while staff reassure them that the examination is scientific and the records confidential. Under the studio lights, the camera receives bodies as specimens to be documented across their visible variation. The book’s insistence on the subjects’ exposure makes the contrast with the institution’s calm assurances stark: confidentiality is promised, but the examination places each person under the camera’s judgement and places their information into a racial archive.

Classification, Data, and Political Purpose

The centre’s administrative routines join observation to large-scale calculation. Monthly returns count people by racial categories; in one April report, 672 people are assessed, with figures divided among Slav, Aryan, and Mischlinge classifications, while Roma and Jews are listed separately. The records are duplicated onto punched cards, boxed for transport to Prague, and then forwarded to Berlin. There, Hollerith machines sort, assemble, and analyse cards at a stated rate of 150 per minute. The institution imagines that correlations extracted from this mass of information will reveal the keys to human race and identity.

That aspiration is also the centre’s contradiction. When Reinhard Heydrich asks about identifying Jews through inherited diseases, Stahl acknowledges that the diseases are not confined to Jews and that not all Jews have them. He describes instead a search for combinations of minute phenotypic differences that might support a racial diagnosis, with the Hollerith machines intended to sort the accumulated data. The method does not establish the clean boundary its political purpose requires. Its apparent neutrality depends on categories imposed in advance and on the hope that measurements will validate them.

The institution’s own reasoning exposes the gap between empirical results and ideological certainty. When the centre is ordered closed, the stated objection is that it has failed to distinguish Nordic, Slav, and Semitic groups scientifically. The decision does not treat the failure as evidence against the categories; it treats the research as flawed because common sense is presumed already to know that the difference exists. The project’s demand is therefore not open-ended inquiry but measurement capable of confirming a predetermined racial order.

Closure and Reuse

The Reichsprotektor’s office announces that the centre is to close and its personnel are to return to their former occupations. Staff pack their suitcases and receive rail passes for Berlin, Jena, and Leipzig. Measuring instruments and furniture are removed; files are boxed for transfer to Berlin, while furnishings are sent to offices in Město, Prague, and Warsaw. The house’s institutional occupation ends, but its records and equipment do not simply disappear.

The Hollerith machines are unscrewed from the garage floor and loaded onto trucks for an undertaking expected to make more fruitful use of them: the new camp complex near Oświęcim. This relocation gives the failed research centre a grim afterlife. Its attempt to turn human variation into measurable racial diagnosis has not produced the certainty its leaders wanted, yet its data-processing machinery is sent onward into the camp system.

The House Across Changing Uses

The centre occupies a house already defined by the contrast between architectural openness and the private life it was built to contain. The Landauers’ home, designed by Rainer von Abt, had been a family dwelling whose construction grew alongside Ottilie’s early development. Its spaces and materials once belonged to domestic routine; under occupation, the same rooms are rearranged around files, examinations, and cameras. The conversion is not just a change of tenants but a remaking of what the architecture permits and signifies.

The novel later places this Nazi use within the building’s wider history. In the socialist period, Landauer House serves as a children’s physiotherapy gymnasium, and Tomáš calls the gymnasium the Glass Room, linking the word for a room with its sense of peace or tranquillity. Decades later, the building is repaired and presented as architectural heritage: the Glass Room’s windowpanes are replaced with plate glass to recover its lucid appearance, and visitors come to see the work associated with von Abt. Across these uses, the same remarkable space becomes a family room, a racial laboratory, a place of treatment, and an object of preservation. Its changing functions make visible how political power and later memory can recast a home without erasing the uses that came before.