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Series Editors’ Introduction R E G N A D A R N E L L A N D S T E P H E N O . M U R R AY Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans, and the contributors to this collection of essaysexplorethecomplexstoryofhoweugenicsandraceasopposedtoculture andclassbecamethetouchstonesofGermananthropologicalscienceduringthe SecondWorldWar(1939–45inEurope).Naziscienceplacedremarkablevalue on anthropological justification for its policies of genocide, and the discipline, notonlyinGermany,stillstruggleswithitscomplicity.Theseissuesareusually framed for English readers in terms of Anglo-American responses to Nazi and Holocaust literatures, from outside what are judged to be the unambiguously deplorablemisusesofscienceintheserviceofideologyandpragmaticpolitics. An ocean of separation from Europe, at least at the time, allowed American protestations of innocence, despite its own considerable development of eugenics and scientific racism. This collection presents detailed case studies of how racial science was adapted to local conditions in a wide variety of European nation-states within the Nazi sphere of influence. The internal variability and cultural specificity of thesecaseshavehithertobeeninvisible,especiallyoutsideEurope,becausewe have inherited a simplistic and unnuanced narrative of the Holocaust and the science underlying it. Hitler’s racial science was by no means confined to Germany, although its intellectual underpinnings arose from the international hegemony of the German research universities. These essays demonstrate how satellite states acted asactiveparticipantsindefiningracialscienceinrelationtolocalagendas.Inno x Series Editors’ Introduction casewasthenationalideologycoextensivewiththatofNaziGermany;yetineach countrylocalissuesfoundfertilegroundforthepursuitofnationalidentityand autonomybasedonGermanracialscienceastranslatedintolocalterms.Motives, negotiations, bureaucratic regimes, and outcomes varied sharply in Denmark, Italy,Austria,Latvia,Estonia,Hungary,andRomania.Contemporaryscholars fromeachofthesenationaltraditionsoftencometothecomparativetaskwithan anthropologicalorethnographicmindset.Bycontrast,agencyattheperipheryis thecommonproblemthatunitesthissetofessaysintoasustainedcritiqueofthe arbitraryrestrictionsofscholarshipthatisconfinedbythenationalboundaries and official languages of particular nation-states. Europe in Hitler’s time, as in our own, displayed a fluidity of communication—political, social, economic, andcultural—thatrendersanyexclusivelynationalanalysisincomplete. Race is also a quintessential American problem, one deeply embedded in the subconscious of American anthropology. During the years leading up to World War II, North American anthropology explored the autonomy but inextricability of race, language, and culture as ways of classifying the diversity ofhumankind.It wasFranzBoas,himselfanearlyproductofthevery German highereducationsystemthatproducedHitler’sracetheory,whodeconstructed the typology of race and demonstrated the plasticity of racial types. His 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man remainsatrenchantcritiqueofscientificracismand eugenics, in part because it insists on seeing human culture and human biology as sides of a single coin. In any case, Boas’s anthropology was directed to questionsofimmigrantassimilabilityratherthanofpermanentminoritiesthat threatened the ostensible homogeneity of majority populations in European nation-states where the German Romantic tradition supposed a “genius” of one and only one folk (Volk) per nation. Eugenics rather than genocide was the permanent solution envisioned by scientific racism. The questions opened up by this comparative analysis frame antisemitism andgenocideinlocaltermsthatvariedacrossEuropeannation-states.Thebroad effect of Nazi racial science, then, is perhaps best understood as providing a focus point for multiple smoldering resentments based on ethnicity and race; these were played out radically under a regime that privileged the “othering” of some groups, to the point where they were not fully human, and lent the stampofsciencetoviolentintolerance.Demography,history,internaldiversity ofregion,ethnicity,andlocalcircumstancealldeterminedparticularoutcomes within the umbrella of Nazi racial science. ...

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