Nazi Movement Research Articles

Undisclosed facts in Friedrich Wegener's links with Nazism.

Friedrich Wegener was the author of a comprehensive description of a disease that was named Wegener's granulomatosis. In 2010, its name was changed to granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), the reason being that Wegener's links to Nazism were revealed. The research was conducted between May 2021 and August 2023 and was based on the historical method (understood as defining the subject of research, critical analysis of collected historical source materials, and historiographical synthesis) using the methods of direct and indirect inference ascribed to the historical method. Wegener and his wife were members of numerous Nazi organizations. He was rewarded for his stance by the German Reich. Together with his family, he lived in very comfortable conditions for the standards of the time, unattainable for the average person. He described himself as a frontline combatant in the Nazi invasion of Poland. Friedrich Wegener's links with Nazism were more extensive than has hitherto been known. The links involved his professional and private life. They testify to his membership in numerous Nazi organizations, as well as his active involvement in the activities of various institutions and communities of the German Reich and his overt expression of support for Hitler. Wegener's numerous accolades from the German Reich providing him with professional, material and personal benefits were proof of his links with the Nazi movement. Wegener's association with Nazism helped him to advance his career, and to attain a high social status and quality of life, both before the outbreak and during the Second World War.

Far-Right Orientalism and the Uyghurs: Revisiting Gunnar Jarring

No scholar has had a greater impact on the study of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs than the Swedish Orientalist and diplomat Gunnar Jarring (1907–2002). This is thanks, above all, to the remarkable archive of manuscripts from the region that he collected and curated. Known as the Jarring Collection, it may be the largest assemblage of manuscripts by Xinjiang Muslims held anywhere in the world outside China. How was this collection created, and what biases may have informed its development? By exploring the context in which the core of the Jarring Collection was developed, this article reveals unsettling allegations about Jarring’s activities during a shadowy, little-known period in his life — a dark period in Sweden’s history, during which academic and political elites were in thrall to a far-right zeitgeist that dovetailed with Germany’s Nazi movement. The article concludes by considering some implications of the Jarring Collection's biases for the study of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs.

Německý univerzitní patolog v přemetech mimořádné doby. K biografii Franze X. Lucksche (1872–1952)

The pathologist Franz Xaver Lucksch (1872–1952) seems to have been in many ways a rather distinctive personality within the academic landscape of German medicine and medical research in Bohemia. As a member of the generation that grew up during the belle époque, he witnessed all the dramatic turnovers of Central Europe in the twentieth century. A man of considerable scientific ambitions, he became assistant professor (1904) and extraordinary professor (1914) at the Institute of Pathology (Institut für Pathologie) of the German Medical Faculty in Prague under Professor Hans Chiari (1851–1916). Having researched pellagra endemics in Romania in 1910, he returned there in the late 1930s thanks to the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. To the best of our knowledge, he published 48 academic contributions in his lifetime, infectious diseases (including tuberculosis) being the most frequent subject. Lucksch fought in the First World War, ending his military service as a lieutenant colonel of the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Although he at first considered a professional military career in Austria even after 1918, he eventually returned from Vienna to Prague in 1919. There, he continued his medical work and research as a first assistant, which was the position he held for many years. In public life, he was active in spreading awareness of public health issues – probably in reaction to the autopsies he was carrying out. He emphasised the importance of nutrition and prevention of tuberculosis, a disease highly prevalent in Czechoslovakia at the time. But above all, he focused on physical training (Leibesübungen). In 1929–36, he headed the University Physical Training Centre (Hochschulzentrale für Leibesübungen) at the German University in Prague and the German Educational Course for Physical Training of Teachers. Aside from that, he was also a member of the German Association of Gymnasts. This is how Lucksch became acquainted and rather unfortunately politically involved with Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) and his Nazi movement among the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. At first, he was an active member but shortly after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, he found himself in a rather awkward position when the political movement he had previously endorsed started making problems for his Jewish wife and two children. His son, Franz Lucksch Jr. (1916–1966), became also a physician and made a notable scientific career after 1945. In 1936, Lucksch was appointed interim director of the Institute of Pathology. In the spring of 1939, he retired. As an emeritus, he had two part-time jobs: aside from publishing, he still did some teaching and research at the Institute during the academic year, and, in the remaining period, he worked as a pathologist at the Provincial Institute for the Mentally Ill (Landesanstalt für Geisteskranke) in Kosmonosy (Kosmanos), 65km from Prague. At this institution he performed autopsies of patients who died mainly due to extremely bad conditions. After the war, Lucksch was allowed to stay in Prague, but under rather difficult conditions, including financial issues. In connection with the prosecution of Nazi ‘euthanasia’ crimes in the 1960s, a suspicion emerged that he may have conduced tuberculosis experiments on psychiatric patients. Given the particular circumstances, however, this was highly improbable, neither has anything of that kind been proved in connection with Lucksch.

Transnational Propaganda and National Media Cultures in Weimar Political Thought

Abstract This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former world-power status through propaganda. Two transnational propaganda campaigns are examined in closer detail: the German struggle against the Versailles ‘war-guilt clause’ and the fight against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr. They illustrate how exaggerated expectations of the power of propaganda were accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. One important reason for this simultaneity was that Germans discussed propaganda in the light of national media cultures and constructed it as alien to the German nature. Many authors distinguished supposedly genuinely German values such as ‘truthfulness’, decency and profundity from the values of other national cultures, simultaneously complaining that Germany was struggling harder in the field of propaganda than other countries because of this deep-seated disposition. Such national auto-stereotypes extended into the scholarly study of propaganda, making it difficult to conceptualize it as a phenomenon of modern mass communication. The Germans’ ambivalent relationship to propaganda was also evident in politics: while the Weimar governments displayed uneasiness towards propaganda, the Nazi movement called for its unscrupulous use. In this way, the Nazis not only prepared for the destruction of democracy, but also stood for a different understanding of ‘Germanness’.

Arthur E. Haas, from the Atom to the Cosmos—Struggles for a Scientific Career in the Early 20th Century

Arthur E. Haas, from the Atom to the Cosmos—Struggles for a Scientific Career in the Early 20th Century

Nazi Movement in Campus: An Analysis of the Rise of Centralized Power Based on the German Film “Die Welle”

“Die Welle,” which won the German Film Prize in 2008, is a masterfully staged simulation of a fascist ideological control in a schoolyard. The design of the whole campus experiment reflects the results of Germany’s reflection on the anti-Nazi movement, warning the world that we are only five days away from the Nazis. It is a thought-provoking film that deepens the understanding of the Nazi nature of thought control in Germany and provides a dimension of reflection on extreme forms of dictatorship. Using “Die Welle” as a case study text, this paper takes the psychological basis of the rise of totalitarianism as an entry point and thus analyzes how the ideological apparatus uses this psychology to connect with individuals and explores how collectivism develops into authoritarian totalitarianism. This leads to the conclusion that the real root cause of the Nazi movement‘s herd mentality is the misfortune of individual society and the loss of individual rationality. The so-called unity and solidarity reinforced by the Nazi organization are intended to anesthetize the rationality of its members and to conceal its real purpose of manipulating them, which aims to maintain the growth of the organization by controlling the energy gained by them. The main reason for individual members to follow the Nazis blindly is to indulge their own desires and give up rational thinking, allowing Nazi control to be exploited.

“Temporary Solution” or Last Attempt: On the Question of Kurt von Schleicher’s Chancellery at the End of the Weimar Republic (According to the Materials of the Archive of Foreign Policy of Russian Federation)

The period of the last three chancellors of the Weimar Republic before Adolf Hitler became a time of permanent political and economic instability, and the search for a way out of the current impasse. In this context the bet on the figure of Kurt von Schleicher was the last attempt to solve a complex of existing problems within the framework of the existing state model. With a unique political strategy, he tried to achieve social consensus, primarily in the field of economic development. It was supposed to strengthen the military potential of the Weimar Republic, which should have a positive impact on solving the issue of unemployment. The nominal support of the military circles and closeness to President Hindenburg, however, did not become a guarantee of success in the face of growing ultra-right sentiment and the demand for immediate change. The general was unable to “tame” the influential Nazi movement, to turn it into a constructive element of the existing regime. Thus, Kurt von Schleicher’s chancellorship did not realize the potential for the extension and evolution of the Weimar political system.

Deutsche Kulturpropaganda und deutsche Auslandsschulen. Von der Kaiserzeit bis in den Nationalsozialismus

During the German Emperor Period—aside of the few state-financed foreign “propaganda” schools—German private schools in external countries were put under the influence of German foreign cultural policy. The focusing on political consideration increased afterWWIas result of the treaty ofVersailles.As part of the heavily discussed foreign policy the mobilization of these schools in foreign countries for the use for propaganda seems restricted until the National Socialists within their aggressive policy changed and made use of these schools in foreign countries for their foreign cultural policy. For a short time, this was realized by the National Socialist Teachers League creating inside a Foreign School District. To study the result of their activity in the archives only few documents have survived for research explaining the work and its ideology, stressing the teachers engaged with their role of a cultural ambassador of the Nazi movement.

Nazi Germany's Propaganda Machine: The Rise

Peculiarities in German history led to the emergence of a 'special path' (Sonderweg), which was represented by the rise and rise of Adolf Hitler. Because Hitler's 'shadow' was so large, and stretched in technique, approach, ascension, and plan, it shaped the diversity of interpretations of this phenomenon. Nazism was the product of unique features of German history and culture, of political developments different from the rest of the states on the European continent. The character of Adolf Hilter cannot be understood if we use an isolated reflection on what the demagogue, the mob agitator, and the dictator of the Third Reich meant. However, those who follow this path isolated by other means, will reach a conclusion that will be false, and will lead to the "isolation" of this phenomenon from what the sphere of everyday life and unimportant elements means, such as the banal, thus losing it the meaning. Hitler's dictatorship is shaped by premises related to his life, the environment from which he came, education, aspirations, and dreams that dominated the character of the young man, then the soldier, and, finally, the leader Adolf Hitler. This paper is a guide that provides a vision that brings together the opinions and arguments of both specialists and a reflection built from articles, and documents on one of the abnormally and historically interesting characters of the personality that in 1938 was declared by TIME magazine, Man of the Year, who was at the same time dictator, "demon" and demagogue. It is an attempt to understand the one who excited a nation and gradually came into conflict with an entire world. The creation of powerful myths, which, together with the propaganda carefully orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in the Reich, led to the animation of crowds numbering millions of Germans who were fascinated by him and the Nazi movement.

Unsettling Realities of Nazism and the Legacy of the German Neurological Society.

On behalf of the German Neurological Society (DGN), a study was conducted into how far former chairmen, honorary chairmen, and honorary members could be regarded as incriminated from the National Socialist period. While an online supplement of this journal presents seven individual biographies (in six papers) by way of example, this paper offers an overview summarizing the project results and introducing the biographies. The first part and the methodological section discuss the difficulties of retrospectively identifying neurologists involved in the Nazi movement. Formal characteristics (eg, membership of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) or other Nazi organizations or participation in Nazi crimes) and content-related clues (eg, statements reflecting Nazi ideology, personal contacts with Nazi officials or active support of the system) can be helpful. The second part summarizes the principal results of a study of 28 German and Austrian neuroscientists with regard to their involvement and their post-war careers. Six of the seven "founding fathers" of the DGN were former NSDAP members; 10 of the 13 presidents in office until 1976 had belonged to Nazi organizations-the NSDAP, the SA ("Brownshirts") or the SS ("Blackshirts"). Moreover, seven out of 10 honorary presidents had formal or substantive links to National Socialism. Of the German and Austrian honorary members appointed up to 1985, two-thirds had leanings to Nazi ideology or the National Socialist system. This paper concludes by outlining how the DGN and its members are currently addressing this historical legacy in order to establish a responsible culture of remembrance. ANN NEUROL 2021;90:546-557.

Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis

The widespread enthusiasm in Germany for the Nazi regime, which sustained the government of Adolf Hitler in peacetime and into the last year of a war that was turning against the country, has long interested observers. Gellately, the author of several prior books that engaged Nazi Germany, presents in this one an analysis that takes the nationalist, socialist, and antisemitic views of the Nazi movement seriously, showing how they fit with many concepts and policy preferences already held by many Germans.Disappointment and rage about the loss of World War I and the peace treaty of 1919, combined with the convulsions of the Great Depression, made the appeal of Hitler and his political party ever-stronger in the early 1930s. Gellately both carefully and cleverly utilizes a variety of local examples to illustrate the way in which more and more Germans turned to voting for the Nazi Party until it became the country’s largest in free elections.As Gellately shows, by the time German President Paul von Hindenburg had designated him as chancellor, Hitler had already recruited a substantial number of those who would hold leading positions in the regime. A slow but real economic recovery, stimulated by re-armament and public works, consolidated domestic support while publicity about the establishment of concentration camps discouraged the voicing of dissent. Throughout the account, Gellately interjects local examples from a wide variety of contemporary and later sources that illuminate the realities of the time.The regime introduced its euthanasia program so carefully that practically no one among the mass of people was aware that by the fall of 1944, the crippled veterans of World War I had all been killed and that the regime was starting to kill the disabled veterans of World War II. Yet Gellately makes clear that the systematic killing of Jews was not the secret that some people pretended it to be afterward but had proceeded with wide knowledge and wide participation.The years of peace brought the regime a cohesion that the victories in the first years of World War II further consolidated. Gellately might have accorded more attention to the large number of slave laborers Germany imported during the conflict, since many of them worked alongside and under Germans. Benjamin Carter Hett, Burning the Reichstag (New York, 2014), showed that the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 could not have justified the decree abolishing civil liberties and the list of arrests that followed it, as the Germans claimed, because both the decree and the list predated it. Gellately could also have mentioned that Hitler always considered his reluctance to start the war in 1938 his worst mistake; he made sure that no one could cheat him of war in 1939. In view of Gellately’s noted use of local examples from all over Germany, a folded map of the country would have offered the reader a helpful guide.These minor points aside, this work is worthy of serious attention. The way in which the nationalist, socialist, and antisemitic view of Hitler and his political party fit with the preferences of so many Germans surely deserves the exposure that this book affords them. Furthermore, they reveal a level of dedication to Hitler’s regime that is truly extraordinary.

Beyond Caricatures: Nazism, Racism and Racial Sciences (1924-1936)

This article brings forth, organizes and interprets a compound of historical-empirical evidence that allows questioning of two still standing pillars of Nazism political studies: the assumption that the racial aspect of nazi ideology enjoyed a relatively monolithic interpretation within the nazi movement; and the assumption that, after the conquest of power, the nazi Party-State conspired to unilaterally impose such “ideological dogma”, both in theory and practice, on German University and German society. Rather than confirm these oft-repeated conventions, we uncover a much more complex, dialectical and dynamic mesh of relationships involving ideology, pseudoscience and racial science within the nazi movement and under the nazi regime. Keywords: nazism; racism; pseudoscience; science; totalitarianism

The Military Factor in the Context of the Issue of the Social Support of Nazism in the Weimar Republic

The purpose of the article is to define the role of the military element in the formation of the social prerequisites for the supporting the National Socialist movement during the Weimar Republic in historyography. The novelty of this study lies in indentifying the nature and degree of participation of World War I veterans, servicemen, as well as members of paramilitarist organizations in the development of the NSDAP and its military wing. As a result of the study, the orientation of Nazi propaganda was identified to attract former servicemen as electoral support, to involve both broad strata of employed and representatives of the elite in leadership positions in the ranks of stormtroopers, and some features of the development of relations between the officers of the Reichswehr and the Nazi movement.

The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones

Reviewed by: The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones Barry Jackisch The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy. By Larry Eugene Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 636. Cloth $140.00. ISBN 978-1108494076. Larry Eugene Jones's remarkable study of the German Right in the Weimar Republic constitutes an authoritative English-language history of this tremendously important and consequential subject. Based on a vast array of source material compiled over years of research from over thirty different public and private archives, as well as hundreds of other sources, it is hard to imagine another scholar matching the erudition that Jones offers his readers on this subject. [End Page 616] A basic question lies at the book's core: why did a conservative, non-Nazi political party fail to emerge in the Weimar Republic as a viable alternative to the eventual triumph of the Hitler movement? In answering this question, Jones focuses much of his attention on the German National People's Party (or DNVP), the largest and most successful of several conservative political groups in this era. Jones is hardly the first scholar to devote attention to this party. However, his particular contribution explains in detail the larger political universe in which the DNVP operated and shows convincingly why it ultimately failed to assume the mantle of political leadership on the German Right. In studying this broader context, Jones also provides detailed insights into other economic interest groups, radical nationalist and patriotic associations, and a wide range of social and cultural forces that shaped the party's development. Jones clearly stakes out his argument in the introduction: the disunity of the German Right was an essential political factor in the Weimar Republic's collapse and Hitler's ultimate success. He pursues this argument consistently throughout the book's eighteen main chapters and the epilogue. This thesis takes issue with earlier studies stressing stronger lines of continuity between Germany's established political Right and the upstart Nazi movement. As Jones makes very clear, substantial divisions existed both within the DNVP and among the wide array of groups that orbited within the bizarre galaxy of right-wing politics. This disunity made the formation of a stable and long-term conservative political party, one that might have blunted the popular appeal of Nazism later in the 1920s, very difficult indeed. This failure had much to do with the DNVP's inability to resolve a fundamental dilemma. Jones details how the party gained increasing popular support in the republic's first years by stridently opposing government policies that allegedly threatened Germany's national pride and honor. However, after the party's electoral success in the 1924 elections, its leaders faced growing pressure to join a national government. This forced a shift from the comfort of angry opposition to the distinctly more challenging task of shaping government policy and working with other political leaders to advance a broader agenda based on political compromise. The DNVP's participation in two national governments in 1925 and 1927 laid bare its basic inability to move successfully from the national opposition to an effective and popular ruling party. Jones recounts in remarkable detail how key conflicts within the party and between the party and its associated interest groups further undermined the DNVP's development as a unified, popular political force. One of Jones's real strengths is his ability to tease out the often obscure and complex connections between various groups and personalities on the right-wing scene and to explain how their individual actions and views affected the larger political destiny of the German Right. Jones demonstrates that the DNVP's leadership constantly faced various political, economic, cultural, and nationalist factions that sought to push and pull the party in multiple directions to pursue their own agenda. While this is certainly a feature of any modern political [End Page 617] party, the range of interests connected to the DNVP made reaching consensus nearly impossible. For example, could the party effectively represent the economic interests of small farmers, industrialists, shopkeepers...

Four responses to Nazism

This article examines four memoirs (by Jan Petersen, Sebastian Haffner, Nora Waln, and Hermann Rauschning) published in pre-war Britain which describe their authors� firsthand experience of life under National Socialism. These writers came from across the political spectrum, but by 1940 they had all risked their lives to escape and oppose the Nazi regime from a position of exile. Their powerful memoirs were an attempt to explain to international audiences what exactly had taken place in Germany, and to suggest ways forward. Incorporating a range of approaches, these writers� honest reflections on their personal responses to the Nazi movement offer profound insights to readers today, as we try to understand the increasingly distant Nazi era, but are also confronted by a return of far right ideas to mainstream discourse.

Affective rebirth: Discursive gateways to contemporary national socialism

This paper engages with the growth of contemporary fascism by arguing that affect plays a key role in its discourse. Departing from an understanding of affect as integral to discourse, the paper explores how the myth of palingenesis is employed by the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement to recruit new members. A methodological combination of affective – discursive theory, detailed representational analysis, and a critical reading that buys into the representations reveals the recruitment discourse as offering an affective script of feeling angry, insulted, and ashamed, as well as courageous, proud, and hopeful. These findings offer important insights into how affective–discursive practices are employed to create gateways to radicalization and ideologically motivated violence. In order to make sense of the attractiveness of contemporary fascism, the paper concludingly argues for multifaceted readings and contemplative critical engagement with the far and extreme right.

Mobilizing the Western tradition for present politics: Carl Schmitt’s polemical uses of Roman law, 1923–1945

ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of Carl Schmitt and his Nazi engagement by chronologically examining the changing uses of Roman law in his Weimar and Nazi thought. I argue that Schmitt’s different ways of narrating the modern reception of Roman law disclose, first, the Nazification of his thought in the spring of 1933, and second, the partial and apologetic de-Nazification of his thinking in the 1940s. While Schmitt’s Weimar-era works are defined by a positive use of Roman imagery, ranging from Schmitt’s support to the Catholic Church to his endorsement of Benito Mussolini’s ‘total state’ in Italy, Schmitt’s Nazi writings from 1933 to 1936 describe the reception of Roman law as an anti-German virus that must be overcome by the Nazi movement. This shift mirrors Schmitt’s transformation from an authoritarian thinker sympathetic to Italian Fascism into a devoted Nazi. However, once Schmitt begins to see that Germany will lose World War II, he recalibrates his position. While Schmitt’s earlier Nazi writings offered a negative estimation of the historical school of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in his 1943/44 book on European legal science, Schmitt portrays Savigny as the paradigmatic European, whose work opens the path for a renewed legal science.

Competing visions of anti-communism in interwar Germany: Catholic and Nazi portrayals of the 'Judeo-Bolshevik' threat

This article explores the antisemitic and anti-communist ideas put forward by Catholic publicists and early Nazi activists in the aftermath of the First World War. The paper argues that one of the keys to the success of the early Nazi movement was its ability to weave together distinct, and potentially competing, strands of anti-Bolshevik imagery into a potent blend that appealed particularly to disillusioned Catholics in Munich, thus helping helping the movement survive its tumultuous infancy.

Carl Schmitt as a theorist of the 1933 Nazi revolution: “The difficult task of rethinking and recultivating traditional concepts”

Carl Schmitt sees the 1933 Nazi seizure of power as a revolution that inaugurates an entirely new era of political-legal order. Analyzing Schmitt’s rarer Nazi-texts, diaries, and correspondence, I argue that from 1933 to 1936 Schmitt attempts to theorize the Nazi revolution by developing an entirely new political language of Nazism, cleansed from non-German ways of thinking, especially nineteenth-century liberalism. I focus on three conceptual transformations through which Schmitt understands the remaking of the German state: (1) The shift from the liberal democratic neutral state to a new one-party state or a Fuhrer-state dominated by a movement – a shift symbolized by the “death of Hegel”; (2) the transformation of sovereign power into Fuhrertum (“leadershipness”), represented by the symbolical deaths of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, whose thought cannot comprehend the totality of the Nazi movement, and (3) the perversion of the liberal-democratic equality before the law to the volkisch equality of the race (Artgleichheit) as the basis of all Nazi political–legal life. Criticizing previous interpretations of Schmitt’s Nazi thinking, I demonstrate that when Schmitt abandons his own decicionist thought in favor of concrete order thinking in 1933/1934 the idea of race becomes the basis of his political–legal thought.

Catholic racism and anti-Jewish discourse in interwar Austria and Slovakia: the cases of Anton Orel and Karol Körper

ABSTRACT Szabó’s study deals with the phenomenon of so-called Catholic racism, that is, the penetration of racist argumentation into anti-Jewish polemics within European Catholicism, in the first half of the twentieth century. It presents the ideas of two Catholic intellectuals—Anton Orel from Austria and Karol Körper from Slovakia—to demonstrate that, while this process unfolded against the background of the rising Nazi movement in Germany, it was specific to the different national contexts of Central Europe. While in Germany several Catholic commentators and theologians sought to reconcile Catholic doctrine with notions of racial supremacy, in other countries they responded differently to such tendencies. The Austrian writer Anton Orel, for example, highlighted the supranational identity of a ‘Great Austria’ (Grossösterreich) based on Catholicism and corporatism, as opposed to German national and Protestant racism, whereas his Slovak colleague Körper surprisingly drew inspiration from the white supremacist ideology of North America. Apart from the different national contexts, Szabó’s study also describes the transnational character of Catholic racism. In modern Catholic antisemitism Jews are stereotyped not only based on religious differences but, in the light of conspiracy theories, they are also presented as an embodiment of modernization, a socio-economic and political ‘threat’. Another specific feature of Catholic racism is the fact that it did not primarily defer to the authority of natural science, which had challenged its earlier monopoly on the interpretation of the world and man’s place in it. Instead, its supporters gave a political character to the traditional doctrine of substitution theology, so-called supersessionism, based on which Christians claimed to assume the role of the Jews as the chosen people. Correspondingly, the chosenness of the Jewish people is negatively connoted as a conspiracy of the ‘Jewish race’ against the Catholic religion and traditional states as well as new Christian-corporative nations, which Jews had allegedly sought to subdue in their conquest for world domination by means of capitalism or Bolshevism. Catholic racism is thus set in the wider context of the development of modern antisemitism towards its most radical Nazi form. Not even the Nazis were able to define their anti-Jewish bias scientifically, and they were therefore dependent on religious cultural models.