Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (review)

Richard F. Wetzell. Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945. Studies in Legal History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiv + 348 pp. $39.95 (0-8078-2535-2).

Given the sinister importance of law enforcement in early-twentieth-century German history, it is surprising that no comprehensive study has been written until now on German criminological theory. Richard Wetzell goes a long way toward filling this gap with a groundbreaking and thorough survey of German criminological thought, from the reception of Cesare Lombroso's theory of the "born criminal" at the end of the nineteenth century to state-supported "criminal biology" under the Nazis. Wetzell argues that despite the increasingly eugenic discourse that marked German social policy and ultimately led to abuses in the Third Reich, German criminology remained relatively resistant to crude biological determinism. Indeed, Lombroso's theory of an atavistic criminal man found little reception among the relatively sophisticated German criminological community in the 1880s. Criminologists such as Emil Kraepelin and Julius Koch preferred psychological explanations that linked crime to mental illness under the banner of "criminal psychology."

Germany's defeat in World War I, however, sharpened the debate on the origins of crime. While some Weimar criminologists sought to launch a "criminal-sociological" school that emphasized the importance of environment, so-called criminal biology emerged as the dominant theory in the 1920s. Eventually supported by most major German criminologists, including Gustav Aschaffenburg, Johannes Lange, and Friedrich Stumpfl, criminal biological theory maintained that criminality was caused by a mixture of hereditary personality traits and environmental influences. Criminal biology became fixated on the search for a criminal gene, yet Wetzell demonstrates that most Weimar criminologists remained true to scientific principles, and as their methodology became more sophisticated, they admitted that the interplay between heredity and milieu was too complex for them to proclaim the discovery of clear hereditary factors in criminality. Ironically, Wetzell points out, the "increasing sophistication of criminal biologists made their goal harder to reach" (p. 177).

With the Nazi seizure of power, many German criminologists sought to emphasize the hereditary aspects of their research in order to demonstrate their compatibility with the biological politics of the Third Reich. A number became Nazi party members and supported such Nazi measures as preventive detention, sterilization of the mentally ill, and the planned Community Alien Law. Yet most criminal biologists maintained a sophisticated methodological approach to their work that undermined any facile notions of hereditary determinism. Most Nazi-era criminologists did not link crime to race. In an especially fascinating chapter on criminology and eugenics, Wetzell effectively shows that criminologists only half-heartedly supported the forced sterilization of criminals, and they prevented the inclusion of prisoners in the scope of the 1933 sterilization law on the grounds that the direct connection between criminality and heredity had not been satisfactorily established. Wetzell's purpose is not to exculpate German criminologists from their participation in Nazi criminal policy; indeed, he suggests that the fact that many entertained serious scientific objections to the idea of hereditary criminality but nonetheless went along with Nazi biological politics condemns them all the more.

Inventing the Criminal provides a well-researched overview of the development of German criminological thought (although it is unfortunate that two of the more colorful personalities in this field, the National-Bolshevist Hans von Hentig and the socialist Rainer Fetscher, make only brief appearances), and it addresses a fundamental problem at the heart of the history of medicine and science in Germany--namely, the task of disentangling elements of Weimar science that were comparatively "normal" from those that pushed the German eugenic project into murder under the Nazis. Wetzell convincingly demonstrates how the scientifically professional German criminological community upheld scientific methodology, and yet also embraced dubious notions of hereditary criminality. At times one wishes the author had analyzed his rich sources further...