Series Editors' Introduction

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Holocaust and Historiographical Debates on Racial Science

Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans

1. Defining "(Un)Wanted Population Addition": Anthropology, Racist Ideology, and Mass Murder in the Occupied Eas

Isabel Heinemann

2. Preserving the "Master Race": SS Reproductive and Family Policies during the Second World War

Amy Carney

3. Germanic Brothers: The Dutch and the Germanization of the Occupied East

Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel

4. Pure-Blooded Vikings and Peasants: Norwegians in the Racial Ideology of the SS

Terje Emberland

5. "Nordic-Germanic" Dreams and National Realities: A Case Study of the Danish Region of Sønderjylland, 1933-1945

Steffen Werther

6. Eugenics into Science: The Nazi Period in Austria, 1938-1945

Thomas Mayer

7. Biological Racism and Antisemitism as Intellectual Constructions in Italian Fascism: The Case of Telesio Interlandi and La difesa della razza

Elisabetta Cassina Wolff

8. Eradicating "Undesired Elements": National Regeneration and the Ustasha Regime's Program to Purify the Nation, 1941-1945

Rory Yeomans

9. "If Our Race Did Not Exist, It Would Have to Be Created": Racial Science in Hungary, 1940-1944

Marius Turda

10. In the Shadow of Ethnic Nationalism: Racial Science in Romania

Vladimir Solonari

11. Building Hitler's "New Europe": Ethnography and Racial Research in Nazi-Occupied Estonia

Anton Weiss-Wendt

12. In Pursuit of Biological Purity: Eugenics and Racial Paradigms in Nazi-Occupied Latvia, 1941-1945

Björn M. Felder

13. The Eternal Voice of the Blood: Racial Science and Nazi Ethics

Wolfgang Bialas

Contributors

Index

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.

Anton Weiss-Wendt is the head of the research department at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. Rory Yeomans is the senior international research analyst at the International Directorate of the UK Ministry of Justice. He is the author of Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945.