Book Review: McConnell on Weiss-Wendt & Yeomans, Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe
Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans. Racial
Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2013. 416 pp. $50.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8032-4507-5.
Reviewed by Michael McConnell (University of
Tennessee-Knoxville)
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
Racial Science on the Frontiers of Hitler's Europe
Alongside the theme of modernity, the subject of racial
exclusion rests at the center of the now voluminous scholarship dedicated to
the Third Reich. In particular, hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have
investigated the caustic forms of racial science, which undergirded Nazi
ideology and provided the rationale for Adolf Hitler's regime's murderous and
utopian efforts to restructure Europe demographically. Yet surprisingly little
is known about the ways in which Nazi racial thinking interacted with local
state and parastatal institutions in the German occupied territories, not to
mention among the Reich's allies.
This collection of thirteen essays edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt
and Rory Yeomans seeks to close this important historiographical gap.
Originating in papers given at a conference on racial science held at the
Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway,
the work is consciously comparative in nature. Jettisoning the traditional
narrative of a top-down imposition from Berlin, the anthology instead
refreshingly seeks to problematize the relationship between Germany and its
vassal and satellite states concerning racial policy. Spanning the breadth of
Nazi Europe, from the Netherlands and Norway to Italy, Romania, and the Baltic
states of Estonia and Latvia, the essays highlight the ways in which
eugenicists and ethnographers not only adhered to the tenets of Nazi racial
doctrine but also subverted or challenged them in order to pursue agendas aimed
at strengthening the body politic in their own countries.