Before the inflation after the First World War, the company had considerable assets, which were gained from well-known foundations, such as that of Heinrich Schliemann.
[1] After the Second World War, the company was temporarily dissolved by the Allies and re-established in the early 1950s, particularly on the initiative of Hans Nevermann.
Since then, the company has been organizing lectures, excursions and forums on a regular basis and promoting the exchange between scientists from different disciplines.
[4] In the past, representatives of the BGAEU have been accused of handling parts of the anthropological collection uncritically and avoiding the post-colonial discourse in public.
[5] Under the chairmanship of Elke Kaiser since 2020, however, a critical and transparent approach to the specialist community has increasingly prevailed, especially with regard to those parts of the anthropological collection that originate from non-archaeological and presumably colonial contexts.
The Society's work focuses on questions of provenance research and the critical appraisal of the origins of the osteological collection.
[7] The collection's administrator, Barbara Teßmann, who was supposedly unaware of the existence of these skulls, gave a racist explanation to the international press for the constitution and survival of the collection of skulls she was continuing to study: She countered the accusation that Virchow wanted to differentiate between "races".