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

Introduction: The Holocaust and Historiographical Debates on Racial Science

Introduction The Holocaust and Historiographical Debates on Racial Science A N T O N W E I S S -W E N D T A N D R O R Y Y E O M A N S ItisnowthirtyyearssincethepublicationofBerntHagtvet,JanPetterMyklebust, andSteinUgelvikLarsen’sWhoWeretheFascists?1Asstatedintheirintroduction, oneoftheobjectivesofthebookwasthecreationofaninternationalnetworkof scholarsinterestedinthesocialhistoryoffascism.Muchhaschangedduringthe past three decades, both in scholarship and in the wider world. The dominant scholarlydiscourseunderwhichmanyoftheEastEuropeancontributorstothe book operated—Marxist historiography—has vanished along with the Communist countries to which they once belonged. Simultaneously, social history has been superseded by cultural history as the dominant tool for the study of totalitarian regimes. Nonetheless, the history of Nazi Germany and specifically the Holocaust is one field of research that has demonstrated continuous scholarly interest in modernization.2 ZygmuntBaumanwasoneofthefirstscholarstoarguethattheHolocaust— and by extension the racial theories that underpinned it—was “genocide with apurpose.”Eradicatingpopulations,hecontended,wasnotanendinitselfbut a grand vision of a better and different kind of society. For Bauman, “modern genocideisanelementofsocialengineering,meanttobringaboutasocialorder 2 A N T O N W E I S S - W E N D T A N D R O R Y Y E O M A N S conforming to the design of the perfect society.” In his now-famous metaphor of landscaping the human garden, physical destruction appears as a necessary chore of weeding, which can be framed as a creative process. Thus, Bauman wrote, “All visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as humanweeds .Likeallotherweeds,theymustbesegregated,contained,prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society boundaries; if all these prove insufficient, they must be exterminated.”3 The issue of modernity has defined the study of society in Nazi Germany fromtheendofthe1960sonward.Whilesomeearlierstudiesattemptedtoplace thesocialhistoryoftheThirdReichfirmlywithinthecontextofracialpolitics, othersexaminedaspectsofmodernizationandeverydaylifesuchasconsumerism , leisure, tourism, and architecture divorced from the Nazis’ racial agenda.4 AmongthesternestcriticsofthenewsocialhistorywereMichaelBurleighand Wolfgang Wippermann. Making a distinction between Nazi racial policy as “reactionary” and its social policy as “progressive” was deeply problematic, in their opinion; indeed, both racial and social policy were symbiotically linked, simultaneously modern and profoundly antimodern. According to Burleigh and Wippermann, race was to supplant class as the primary binding principle in a society with growing cleavages. The Nazis sought to create a racial state by means of modern social policies. Therefore, racial and social policy had to be studied as “an indivisible whole.”5 OneofthemajorcontroversiesinthestudyoftheThirdReichandtheNazi regimeconcernedtheevolutionoftheHolocaust.Specifically,scholarsprobed the extent to which the Holocaust was the result of deliberate policies by the Nazi leadership from the late 1930s onward and/or how far it reflected a range of external and internal pressures.6 While the “intentionalists” were largely political and diplomatic historians who focused overwhelmingly on the personality and ideology of Hitler and suggested a top-down model of Nazi rule, “functionalists” were often social and institutional historians who interpreted the Nazi regime in polycratic terms. The latter argued that the Holocaust was drivenbyimprovisationandtheinternalstruggleforpowerandthereforecame aboutastheresultofpressurefrombelowratherthanarbitrarydecisionsfrom above.7Oneofthemostinfluential,ifcontroversial,examplesofthefunctionalist interpretation of the Holocaust was Vordenker der Vernichtung (translatedinto EnglishasArchitectsofAnnihilation),byGötzAlyandSusanneHeim,published in 1991. Aly and Heim insisted that the explanation for the Holocaust was to Introduction 3 be found not in völkisch (racial) ideas or academic racial treatises but in the utopian economic, industrial, agricultural, and social programs devised by a new generation of ambitious young agronomists, policy analysts, economists, andsocialplannersintheserviceoftheNaziPartysincethelate1930s.Without the input of these young technocrats, they argued, the campaign against the Jewswouldnothaveescalatedintoindustrializedmassmurderbutlikelywould have remained at the level of pogroms and massacres. Combining ideas about economic rationalization and social engineering, they linked the genesis of the Final Solution to the push for Lebensraum (living space) and the attempt to create an empire in Eastern Europe. According to Aly and Heim, the Jews were systematically murdered because economic planners considered them to be an obstacle to the transformation of the rural East European population into a modern, urban middle class, which would constitute a support base for Hitler’s New Europe.8 Aly and Heim contended that elements of everyday routine such as mass tourismandVolkswagencarswerepartofthesameprocessthatledtogenocide. In their view, the Holocaust belonged to the same idea of remaking the world through economic restructuring, the decimation of classes and groups, and working toward the realization of a “modern technocracy.” Model landscapes completewithmotorways,railwaylines,canalprojects,andintegratedeconomic andtransportsystemswereasmuchapartofthelandscapeoftheHolocaustas the barbed wire, watchtowers, and gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz.9 To advance their thesis, Aly and Heim used, among others, the example of scientific advisers in the General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories and the administration of the Warsaw ghetto. Having determined that the ghetto economy was unsustainable without substantial...