Haus der Natur

This guide to Haus der Natur in Salzburg opens on two plaster face casts made in 1940 from a prisoner brought from Dachau, displayed by the museum's founder, Eduard Paul Tratz, in a case he called the Race Studies Section. It traces how Tratz built this natural history museum from nothing in 1924, then joined the SS and rose through its research arm, the Ahnenerbe. Between 1939 and 1943 he crossed into occupied Poland, where Warsaw's state zoological museum lost rare birds, wisents and wildcats that turned up here labeled as ordinary specimens.