"Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut": Das Rasse- & Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (review)

Recently, several institutional histories of Nazi SS and police agencies have come out of Germany. I have had the pleasure of reviewing Michael Wildt's volume on the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office—RSHA) and Jan Erik Schulte's tome on the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Economic-Administration Main Office—WVHA). Eschewing the traditional route of pure structural history, these scholars have written works that are also collective biographies, analyzing the social backgrounds, ideological origins, and career paths of key figures who made the institutions function and lent them their corporate culture. Isabel Heinemann has performed this service admirably in her work on the SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (SS Race and Settlement Main Office—RuSHA). In her strong institutional history of the RuSHA, she stresses the role of the ideologically committed young academics who offered pseudo-scientific definitions for the development of a racial hierarchy of human beings.

Heinemann challenges the traditional thesis that emphasis on racial selection declined during the last years of the war, arguing that permanent membership in the SS remained dependent upon meeting standards of racial purity developed during the 1930s. These standards for conducting a "racial examination of human beings" were developed by RuSHA academics—whom Heinemann labels "race experts" (Rasseexperten)—as an essential tool for realizing Nazi plans to restructure the ethnic composition of German-ruled Europe. These perpetrators were neither the intellectual jurists of the Einsatzgruppen nor the colorless RSHA coordinators of the so-called "Final Solution." They were neither Christopher Browning's "ordinary men," present on the rims of mass graves, nor the brutal thugs guarding the perimeters of the concentration camps. What distinguished them from other groups was their self-image as academic intellectuals and their fanatical belief in National Socialist racial ideology. They numbered perhaps 500 in all, and many of them had academic training, usually in anthropology or ethnogeny (Rassenkunde), but also in agricultural science or animal husbandry. They were not careerists, but convinced ideologues who accepted completely the superiority of the Nordic race and the obligation to facilitate German settlement in the East. Yet the race experts were not merely "mentors of annihilation" (Vordenker der Vernichtung) working on theories at their desks; they were also "practitioners of racial selection" (p. 18), applying the standards they developed for racial selection in the field as "racial suitability examiners" (SS-Eignungsprüfer). During the war, they examined millions of people and made decisions that mandated Germanization, resettlement, deployment as forced labor, or physical annihilation.

The implementation of race and settlement policy evolved in a multitude of police, selection, planning, and welfare operations aimed at "restructuring" the ethnic composition of Europe and involving interaction among RSHA, RuSHA, the office of the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Ethnicity (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFDV), the Ethnic German Liaison Agency (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle—VoMi), and the Lebensborn Foundation. Challenging Koehl's thesis of RKFDV office predominance here, Heinemann bases her argument on the plausible but perhaps not fully proven theory that the dispersal of RuSHA personnel to other SS think tanks and executive agencies increased rather than weakened RuSHA influence in the field.

The SS developed a model to implement race and settlement policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, even if the pace of "Germanization" there was modest at best. SS-managed regional land offices seized and redistributed property, police agencies expelled the Czech population, and race experts determined who was "German." As many as 100,000 Czechs were subjected to racial examinations as SS authorities made decisions on naturalization, recognition of ethnic German status, treatment of Jewish-German Mischlinge, and marriages between Czechs and Germans. Race and Settlement Detachments (Rasse- und Siedlungskommandos) moved into Poland with the Einsatzgruppen; their task was to register and confiscate farmland and enterprises owned by...