Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945

Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496211323
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938–1945, international scholars examine the theories of race that informed the legal, political, and social policies aimed against ethnic minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. The essays explicate how racial science, preexisting racist sentiments, and pseudoscientific theories of race that were preeminent in interwar Europe ultimately facilitated Nazi racial designs for a "New Europe."

The volume examines racial theories in a number of European nation-states in order to understand racial thinking at large, the origins of the Holocaust, and the history of ethnic discrimination in each of those countries. The essays, by uncovering neglected layers of complexity, diversity, and nuance, demonstrate how local discourse on race paralleled Nazi racial theory but had unique nationalist intellectual traditions of racial thought.

Written by rising scholars who are new to English-language audiences, this work examines the scientific foundations that central, eastern, northern, and southern European countries laid for ethnic discrimination, the attempted annihilation of Jews, and the elimination of other so-called inferior peoples.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Holocaust and Historiographical Debates on Racial Science
• 1. Defining “(Un)Wanted Population Addition”: Anthropology, Racist Ideology, and Mass Murder in the Occupied East
• 2. Preserving the “Master Race”: SS Reproductive and Family Policies during the Second World War
• 3. Germanic Brothers: The Dutch and the Germanization of the Occupied East
• 4. Pure-Blooded Vikings and Peasants: Norwegians in the Racial Ideology of the SS
• 5. “Nordic-Germanic” Dreams and National Realities: A Case Study of the Danish Region of Sønderjylland, 1933–1945
• 6. Eugenics into Science: The Nazi Period in Austria, 1938–1945
• 7. Biological Racism and Antisemitism as Intellectual Constructions in Italian Fascism: The Case of Telesio Interlandi and La difesa della razza
• 8. Eradicating “Undesired Elements”: National Regeneration and the Ustasha Regime’s Program to Purify the Nation, 1941–1945
• 9. “If Our Race Did Not Exist, It Would Have to Be Created”: Racial Science in Hungary, 1940–1944
• 10. In the Shadow of Ethnic Nationalism: Racial Science in Romania
• 11. Building Hitler’s “New Europe”: Ethnography and Racial Research in Nazi-Occupied Estonia
• 12. In Pursuit of Biological Purity: Eugenics and Racial Paradigms in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, 1941–1945
• 13. The Eternal Voice of the Blood: Racial Science and Nazi Ethics
• Contributors
• Index