Nazi Racism Research Articles

Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (review)

Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia). Edited by Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro. (Brescia, Italy: Editrice Morcelliana. 2004. Pp. 411. euro28.00.) Daniele Menozzi, of the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, and Renato Moro, of the Universita degli studi Roma Tre, edited this worthy volume based on research and conferences at the University of Florence and at the University of Urbino's Romolo Murri Foundation. Given the book's concentration on the Spanish, French, and Italian experience, here mainly concerns its right-wing dimensions rather than its communist one. Nor does German Nazism figure much except in discussions of Mussolini's alliance -with Hitler. Nevertheless, given the enormous volume of recent work on how the Holy see or the German Catholic Church faced Nazi racism, Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo provides needed context and reminds us that Rome's response to interwar Latin totalitarianism was ambivalent. One question provoked by the book's title might be the choice of the word totalitarianism, a concept that touches every essay in one way or another. Among the central questions for historians of fascism are ones of definition; is fascism, for instance, or is totalitarianism? Such queries apply to this book. How totalitarian was Mussolini's state? Menozzi and Moro acknowledge difficulties with this term that, they note, the Church did not use until about 1938 (p. 374). Other concepts at work include secularization and, more important for the purposes of the book, what the Italians call statolatria or state worship .The essays in Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo mix Catholic elements into this stew. Many of the figures dealt with here ponder the idea of a universal state, often in efforts to reconcile the Church and Mussolini's regime, recalling both pagan and the Christian Roman Empire, medieval Christendom, modern Italian nationalism, and the Duce's resurrected empire in Africa. Menozzi and Moro group the collection into three sections. The first, titled Authority, deals with the Church and the new twentieth-century false religion of statolotria. Menozzi begins with a discussion of Pius XI's 1925 encyclical, Quas primas on the social kingdom of Christ and its interpretation as either a political call to arms or as a spiritual document. Quas primas occurs in many of the following studies. The next chapter, by Giovanni Vian, samples Italian bishops for their ideas on power and authority, concepts that they preferred over anarchy and mob rule. For them, Fascism offered solace and the Lateran Accords. Alfonso Botti concludes with a study of the Spanish Church and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and recalls the question here of whether or not he was, indeed, a totalitarian? Like the split over Quas primas, Botti finds diverse judgments on the regime, from (at times) suspicious Jesuits to more sympathetic Augustinians. …

Why Mussolini turned on the Jews

ABSTRACT Mussolini's abrupt turn towards antisemitism in October 1938 is conventionally explained by virtue of external factors, most importantly, as an aspect of Fascist Italy's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. Adler explores a complementary hypothesis that accounts for racism in terms of factors internal to the dynamics of Italian Fascism itself, namely, a progressive radicalization of the regime during the 1930s aimed at the realization of a new imperial-totalitarian state, one that, in turn, would create a new homogeneous nation and indeed a New Man, a uomo fascista. Unlike Nazi racism, oriented backward towards the preservation of a given racial purity, Fascist racism categorically rejected Italians as they had been constituted historically. Instead, it was oriented towards a future project, an anthropological revolution that would create nothing less than a new race. Jews were seen as obstacles to this cultural transformation because they were historically bound to the decadent liberal state, as well as to the corrupting bourgeois spirit that informed it.

Harvest of despair: life and death in Ukraine under Nazi rule

Karel C. Berkhoff. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 463pp.This is a fascinating and much-needed study of people's life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, an administrative unit that at its largest included the larger part of German-occupied Ukraine-Volhynia, all of Right-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv and Poltava oblasts on the Left Bank, and Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovs'k oblasts in southern Ukraine. Over one hundred pages of notes referring to numerous secondary sources and archival documents from various depositories in Ukraine, Russia, Germany and the United States emphasize how well researched this study is.Earlier classic works, like Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia, examined the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union from a history from above perspective, focusing on the power struggle between Erich Koch and Alfred Rosenberg and the continuous infighting between other German officials and institutions. Harvest of Despair, by contrast, looks at the events through the eyes of those on the receiving end, the civilian population of Ukraine. This Alltagsgeschichte approach is the main merit of the book.The study is structured thematically, covering different aspects of people's life, death and survival in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Chapter I describes the German advance into Ukraine and the Soviet retreat. Having committed mass atrocities and employed a scorched-earth policy, the retreating Soviet authorities behaved as a native government, but as a conqueror that had to leave. One of the most important reasons explaining the rapid German advance into Ukraine was the massive desertion and unwillingness to fight for the collective farm regime. Initially, the majority of Ukrainians, especially peasants, welcomed the Germans. People thought that it was not possible to live worse than under the Soviets. The next chapter portrays the establishment of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the radically racist ethos of the reichskommissar Erich Koch and his entourage, which permeated all levels of Nazi civil administration and set the ground for further brutalization of German policy.Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the genocide of the Jews and the mass murder of Soviet POWs. The vast majority of the local population did interfere to help the Jews. While traditional anti-Semitism partially accounts for such a response, the fear of denunciation and the death penalty played a major role. Those who denounced hiding Jews very often did so to obtain property or reward or to prove their reliability to the authorities rather than because of anti-Jewish sentiments.The starvation of the Soviet POWs was a result of Nazi racist beliefs. The German military command obstructed aid from the local population that could have spared the lives hundreds of thousands of POWs. The mass starvation happened despite the excellent Ukrainian harvest of 1941.Chapter 5 analyzes life in the countryside. Hoping to get their land back, initially the overwhelming majority of peasants were pleased with the arrival of the Germans. Peasants' living standards generally improved during the occupation. But, with the collective system largely left intact and increasing abuse and violence, they began to consider their situation at least as bad as under the Soviet system.The next two chapters deal with the situation in the cities. Conditions of life significantly deteriorated for all city dwellers except the small group of entrepreneurs. Scholars, who were considered useless by the Nazis, were left to starve. …

Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, by Bryan Mark Rigg

"Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, by Bryan Mark Rigg." Canadian Journal of History, 39(3), pp. 606–607

Speciesism as a precondition to justice

Over and above fairness, the concept of justice presupposes that in any community no one member's wellbeing or life plan is inexorably dependent on the consumption or exploitation of other members. Renunciation of such use of others constitutes moral sociability, without which moral considerability is useless and possibly meaningless. To know if a creature is morally sociable, we must know it in its community; we must know its ecological profile, its species. Justice can be blind to species no more than to circumstance. Speciesism, the recognition of rights on the basis of group membership rather than solely on the basis of moral considerations at the level of the individual creature, embodies this assertion but is often described as a variant of Nazi racism. I consider this description and find it unwarranted, most obviously because Nazi racism extolled the stronger and the abuser and condemned the weaker and the abused, be they species or individuals, humans or animals. To the contrary, I present an argument for speciesism as a precondition to justice.

<sc>Bryan Mark Rigg</sc>. <italic>Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military</italic>. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. Pp. xxi, 433. $29.95

<sc>Bryan Mark Rigg</sc>. <italic>Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military</italic>. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. Pp. xxi, 433. $29.95

Reviews of Books:Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military Bryan Mark Rigg

Reviews of Books:Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military Bryan Mark Rigg

X-Men as J Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie

The recent movie X-Men (2000) reflects the assimilationist aims, ethnic anxieties, and liberal idealism of the first-generation Jewish Americans who created the original superheroes featured in Marvel Comic Books. Their rejection of Nazi racism, abhorrence of the Holocaust, and support of the Civil Rights Movement motivated them to make Magneto, the antagonist of the X-Men, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who reasonably fears that a new race of mutants like himself may face persecution and eventual extermination if they do not mount a preemptive strike against paranoid humans intent on suppressing the threat posed by beings with special powers. The X-Men follow a mutant who advocates acculturation and the channeling of their superhuman abilities to defend humankind. Bryan Singer, the Jewish director of the movie, has retained the encounter with the Holocaust and the struggle against bigotry as key themes in his film. He also has associated these themes with other instances of past or present manifestations of mass hysteria and discrimination in American politics. Thus, the movie can be understood on two levels: superficially, it is a special effects, action adventure, science fiction movie that appeals to teenagers; substantively, it is an allegory about the continuing debate over whether the United States should promote ethnic, racial, and religious equality and diversity or whether it should become a more homogenous and less multicultural society.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers. The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

On the murderous road to purity Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, eliminating Jews from the rest of the population proved more difficult than he'd anticipated. Nowhere was that process more contradictory and confused than in the German military. Bryan Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or partial-Jews (Mischlinge), in the wake of laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. He demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought - perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. A great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which under Hitler was forced to look deeply into the racial ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law that produced numerous exemption orders, many bearing Hitler's own signature. Inevitably, Nazi politics trumped military logic, making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Rigg's groundbreaking study exposes from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's regime.

Lord Hailey, the Colonial Office and the Politics of Race and Empire in the Second World War: The Loss of White Prestige (review)

Reviewed by: Lord Hailey, the Colonial Office and the Politics of Race and Empire in the Second World War: The Loss of White Prestige Sonya O. Rose Suke Wolton, Lord Hailey, the Colonial Office and the Politics of Race and Empire in the Second World War: The Loss of White Prestige (London, Macmillan, 2000 and New York, St. Martin’s, 2000) Suke Wolton’s The Loss of White Prestige is an informative analysis of the complex politics of race and empire during World War II. Wolton’s concern is to understand why race came to be discredited as a language of difference justifying British colonialism. By focusing on the Colonial Office and, in particular, the ideas of Lord Hailey, Wolton shows that over the course of the war a new raison d’etre for British imperialism became consolidated. The author supports other scholars of race and politics in this period such as Paul Rich and Elazar Barkan by maintaining that Nazi racism per se did not discredit the use of white superiority to articulate and defend British policy. Wolton concludes that three factors, in combination, led to a changed language: the association of racial ideology with the enemy, the fear of political unrest and revolt in the colonies, and the necessity to develop a “new language”, in particular to reach some workable accord with the U.S. on the question of Britain’s colonial relationships. The author suggests in the second chapter that early in the war Lord Hailey supported the policy of indirect rule, but by 1943 he argued against that policy and the “dual mandate” in favor of British rather than African institutions taking responsibility for promoting colonial development. Wolton suggests that Hailey’s transformation “is an indication of the shift in outlook of the British Colonial Office.”(p.39) It came about, in part, because of a growing recognition that “white prestige” in the colonies was ebbing. Hailey and others in the Colonial Office became increasingly aware of “racial consciousness” and the possibilities of “a black revolt”. Wolton suggests that a major turning point during the war was the fall of Singapore in the Far East. Drawing on the work of Christopher Thorne, Wolton maintains that the Pacific war was experienced in London and Washington as a potential threat to white authority. The “shock of defeats by Japan”, the author concludes, compelled the Colonial Office to reconsider how the colonies were administered.(p.63) Chapter Three considers the growing investment by Colonial Office officials in confronting the color bar, both at home and in the colonies. Wolton proposes that Colonial Office resistance to American racial discrimination against both black Americans and British colonial subjects is indicative of the general shift that she suggests was occuring over the period of the war. Although acknowledging that the Colonial Office did not directly confront the Americans about their treatment of black British people, she suggests that a film made by the Ministry of Information with the cooperation of the Americans for newly arrived American servicemen cautioning GIs to respect British racial tolerance was indicative of how much was changing on the part of both governments with regard to race. Yet, although Wolton does not say this directly, her evidence suggests that only very minimal progress was made. What progress was made, Wolton argues, “may have encouraged the department to eventually consider race relations not only as something politically important but also as something that they could contain.”(p.93) In the fourth chapter Wolton considers Hailey’s increasing commitment to Britain’s role in the economic development of the colonies as a way to legitimate the empire. Economic development was constructed as necessary for the colonies prior to their achieving a “self-governing status.” Wolton proposes that the Atlantic Charter and its principle of “freedom from want” was significant in the construction of this argument. In the final substantive chapter of the book, “Reformulating Imperial Authority,” Wolton argues that Hailey’s idea of using the term “partnership” to replace “trusteeship” gained ground in the U.K., and significantly, it received the stamp of approval of the United States. Hailey also successfully argued for the extension of the idea of social...

Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice

Increasingly, historians have been turning their attention to the effects of Nazi racism. In recent years major studies have appeared on forced sterilization, euthanasia, theft of “racially valuable” children, and “antinatalism,” as well as the destruction of “racially undesirable” groups: the handicapped, certain foreign laborers, and homosexuals.

A Half-Century of Presidential Race Initiatives: Some Reflections

A Half-Century of Presidential Race Initiatives: Some Reflections JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN If context is not everything—and I am one who believes it is not—it is, nevertheless, a valuable instrument for gaining perspective on the past as well as the present. In the scheme of things, fifty years does not seem a very long time, but in the life of a human being it constitutes at least two-thirds ofthe life span that one can reasonably expect. I was reflecting on such matters not long ago as I was attempting to place the rise ofHarry S Truman in the context ofhis times and attempting to understand the complexities ofthe period following World War II that had been an extraordinarilybrutal affair, in some ways the most brutal in human history. It introduced some of the most impersonal methods ofslaughtering human beings, the most brutal ofall was, ofcourse, nuclearwarfare itself. Perhaps the type of warfare and the human casualties were the only thing that overshadowed the miserable state of human and race relations that characterized the war years in the United States. It was not only that my brother, drafted from his position as a high school principal, was told by a white sergeant that he would dedicate his years in the army to seeing that my brother did nothing more exalting than peel potatoes. It was not merely that with four years of experience as an office manager and more than adequate secretarial skills, and a Ph.D. from Harvard, I was toldby a Navy recruiter, desperate for people to manage the naval offices after Pearl Harbor, that I had everything but color! It was also the Jim Crow flying field at Tuskegee, the racially segre­ gated blood banks, the Jim Crow facilities at every military installation, thejob discrimina­ tion in civilian life, and the general segregation of the United States armed forces as the men and women left home to fight abroad for the fourfreedoms. Itwas the mockery ofthehighly touted war aims that caused some white RACE INITIATIVES 227 While African Americans were called on to fight for democracy during World War II, they suffered a raw deal at home. They bore the brunt of segregation, humiliation, and discrimination that this country served up, including second-class status in public facilities and accomodations. Americans and most black Americans to wonder ifthe United States was really serious in claiming that its crusade was against tyranny, Nazi racism, and Japanese militarism. It did not take some foreign ideology or some home-grown radicalism to understand that the carefully cultivated racism in the United States was a powerful force for evil and that the bitterness of African Americans was carefully nurtured by military and public policy. By the spring of 1945, some 497,566 African American men and women were serving overseas in every theater ofwar, while an equal number served in the armed forces at home. Meanwhile, millions ofthem worked in every war-related industrial activity in which they were permitted to serve. In every conceivable way, they bore the brunt of segregation, humiliation, and discrimination that this country could serve up without the slightest twinge of conscience that one could observe. Small wonder that there were innumerable racial clashes on and offmilitary posts. There were riots at Fort Bragg, Camp Robinson, Camp Davis, Camp Lee, Fort Dix, and elsewhere. The emotional conflicts and frustrations that African Americans experi­ enced as they sought to reconcile the doctrine of the four freedoms with their own plight discouraged many and even left some quite disillusioned when they were mustered out of the armed forces. Coming to the presidency in the spring of 1945, Harry S Truman was not long in recognizing that the racial situation in the United States was not only explosive and dangerous, but that it was the responsibility of the United States government to assume a clear responsibility: to take the initiative in ameliorating, even changing things in funda­ mentallyimportantways. The FairEmployment Practices Commission, established by Presi­ dent Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been a first step in providing training and employment for 228 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY African Americans. They soon discovered, however, that the opportunities were limited...

Luc ferry's critique of deep ecology, nazi nature protection laws, and environmental anti-semitism

Neo-Humanist Luc Ferry (1995) has compared deep ecology's declarations of intrinsic value in nature to the Third Reich's nature protection laws, which prohibit maltreatment of animals having “worth in themselves.” Ferry's questionable approach fails to document the relationship between Nazi environmentalism and Nazi racism. German high art and mass media historically presented nature as dualistic, and portrayed Untermenschen as unnatural or inorganic. Nazi propaganda excluded Jews from nature, and identified traditional Jews as cruel to animals. Ferry's idealization of Humanism under reports the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in European thought, including the French Enlightenment.

British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own (review)

Reviewed by: British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own Andrew J. Kunka Phyllis Lassner. British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. x + 293 pp. Phyllis Lassner’s latest work, British Women Writers of World War II, follows Karen Schneider’s Loving Arms, Gill Plain’s Women’s Fiction of the Second World War, and Janet Montefiore’s Men and Women Writers of the 1930s in the process of recovering the works of significant British women writers of the 1930s and 1940s, works neglected by the dominance of the so-called “Auden Generation” in the twentieth-century British literary canon. In terms of the number of authors examined, Lassner is considerably more ambitious than her recent predecessors, though there is some overlap. Of the more than twenty women authors Lassner discusses, the key figures include Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Sayers, Ethel Mannin, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, Vita Sackville-West, Katharine Burdekin, Elizabeth Gouge, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Steen, Lettice Cooper, Betty Miller, Elizabeth Taylor, Phyllis Bottome, and Olivia Manning. Of these authors, Jameson and Mitchison receive the most extensive discussion. By addressing this many authors, Lassner sacrifices depth for breadth, but the study does present a broad range of women writers’ responses to the war, and such variety will do well to break down any persisting stereotypes of a unified feminist attitude toward war. As with Schneider and Plain, Lassner is working against the stereotype of a uniform antiwar pacifism shared by all women: “that all [End Page 1024] wars are wrong and that they destroy women’s culture.” Also at work here is a rejection of the assessment of World War II British fiction as expressed by Salman Rushdie—that England did not create a great literary legacy of the war, and that such an absence represents a blinding nostalgia and an inability to face the changes of contemporary England. Rather than finding a single, uniform reaction to the war, Lassner instead finds profound ambivalence that varies in degree and kind from author to author. While most women writers found it necessary to support the war effort, some only saw the war as the least of all possible evils. These writers’ ambivalence was based on the pacifism resulting from World War I, a distrust of the British government and its fascist potential, a concern with the racism evident in the British population, an understanding of the treatment of women in wartime, and an awareness of the horrifying potential of the Nazi racist ideology. Also, many writers changed their positions on the war as the stories of Nazi atrocities came to light, so variations occur not only between authors, but also between works in an author’s oeuvre. Some writers chose to express their concerns about Nazi aggression through dystopic visions of the future, while others used the historical past to express their concern about the present. The war affected even the most popular genres: women authors of romantic fiction and espionage novels found their writing affected by their views of the war. In examining these writers’ ambivalences, Lassner draws not only from their literature, but also from their lives, demonstrating the active involvement many women took in the war beyond their fiction writing. Some, like Stevie Smith, Storm Jameson, and Phyllis Bottome, traveled to Europe, and even into Germany, to observe firsthand the impact of Nazi ideology on Europeans. Such observations lead these writers to foresee the potential horror if such an ideology were perpetuated. Still others, such as Ethel Mannin and Naomi Mitchison, began the thirties with strong socialist tendencies, yet found as the war approached that any organized ideology unsatisfactorily represented the concerns of women in the time of crisis. Lassner avoids both theorizing and problematizing these writers’ positions, expressing concern that these already-neglected writers would disappear “once again [. . .] in a theoretical debate.” She also wants to refrain from linking all women writers of the war into a single force that dismantles the discourse of war: “Emphasizing writers’ [End Page 1025] changing perceptions, ambivalences, and figuration does not mean that we can only speak of them primarily in terms of destabilizing...

Defining Ancient Greek Ethnicity

Diaspora 6:1 1997 g Ancient Greek Ethnicity David Konstan Brown University Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Jonathan M. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. As the first full-length modern study of ethnicity in the culture that gave us the word, Jonathan Hall's book is an event in classical scholarship. Hall has brought to the task a profound knowledge of the ancient Greek world: he is equally conversant with the literary and archaeological sources, which is rare among classical historians, and thoroughly informed, as well, about the technical specialty of Greek linguistics, which is indispensable to the analysis of the role of language in the construction of ethnic identity. Hall is also up-todate on modern approaches to ethnicity, and, in a fine introductory chapter, he reviews attitudes toward Greek ethnicity within Classics over the past couple of centuries—since the founding, that is, of the modern discipline of classical philology. Hall writes clearly, and has done what he can to make the argument accessible to non-specialists: he translates all Greek words and passages, provides thumbnail summaries of historical or geographical information , and summarizes the current state of the question in respect to the major topics he addresses. Nevertheless, the detailed investigation of obscure and complex Greek genealogies, involving multiple variants and unfamiliar names, or of the differences among the several dialects ofancient Greek and how they may have evolved, will be hard going for the reader who is not moderately conversant with the materials, or at least interested enough to peruse the book with dictionary and encyclopedia in hand. Accordingly , in this review I shall recapitulate the central themes of Hall's book (without, ofcourse, reproducing the meticulous documentation and careful argumentation that make the book so valuable) while simultaneously calling attention to those aspects of Hall's approach that seem to me to be problematic, or at all events debatable. As Hall observes in his Introduction, the second World War was a watershed in ethnic studies. The vicious consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentialist interpretations of race, and ethnic groups came to be defined as social rather than as biological Diaspora 6:1 1997 entities; their coherence was variously attributed to shared myths of descent or kinship, a common territory or at least place of origin, as well as other common traits such as language, religion, customs, and national character. So conceived, ethnic groups are mutable rather than stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than written in the genes. "If the construction of ethnic identity is considered to be primarily discursive, then it is literary evidence that should represent our first point of departure" (2). Accordingly, Hall devotes two long chapters (the third and fourth) to myths of ethnic origin, which in the Greek tradition took the form of elaborate genealogies. This move is telling for Hall's understanding of ethnicity, which privileges the role of kinship. Genealogies are discursive in the sense that they are articulated in language, while other traits such as common style of burial or pottery are not, or need not be. Archaeology has recovered evidence of material practices, or what is sometimes called material culture, in classical sites; linguists observe dialectal variations in the Greek recorded on inscriptions and in certain manuscripts, and reconstruct the evolution of the spoken language in distinct zones such as northwestern Greece or the Péloponnèse. Nevertheless, these differentiae do not constitute, for Hall, markers of ethnic identity on the same level as kinship and descent. Borrowing terminology introduced by D. Horowitz in an article included in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan's influential collection, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), Hall distinguishes between criteria of ethnicity, which are "the definitional set of attributes by which membership in an ethnic group is ultimately determined" (20), and indicia, which "are the operational set of distinguishing attributes which people tend to associate with particular ethnic groups once the criteria have been established" (21). According to Hall, a genealogical connection qualifies as a criterion, while physical characteristics such as skin color, or cultural attributes, like language and religion, are merely indicia, that is, contingent properties which are subject to change and do not enter...

Reevaluating the Third Reich

Despite the passage of time and the accumulation of information about the Nazi era, many crucial aspects still maintain their historical significance and moral urgency. In this thought-provoking volume, distinguished scholars provide critical yet controversial analyses of Nazi racism, economic and industrial policy, the place of ideology in decision making, and the structure and function of the Nazi state. The authors' interpretations of these significant issues are influenced by contemporary concerns such as the focus on social history and everyday life; feminist interest in the role of women and reproductive politics; the emergence of a eugenics paradigm; and investigation into the relationship of big business, labour, and the Nazi economic order. Yet these essays do not collectively normalise the Third Reich nor do they diminish the enormity of its project of systematic mass murder. This challenging book is certain to provoke further debate as it expands our knowledge of the complex dynamics of a brutal regime.

Das Reichskommissariat für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine Studie zur Verwaltungs-, Rechts- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands. By Stephan H. Lindner · Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991. 178 pp. Tables, notes, and bibliography. DM 58. ISBN 3-515-051971-1.

This is a brief study of the interministerial and interagency struggles that surrounded the administration of enemy assets in Nazi Germany. The Reichskommissariat fur die Behandlung feindlichen Verm6gens, which was a creation of the German Foreign Office, operated in a manner similar to its equivalent, the American Alien Property Custodian, at least as regards assets either located within the borders of the Reich or not owned by Jews or other Eastern-peoples in occupied Europe. With these exceptions, foreign properties came under a benevolent form of trusteeship that kept enterprises intact. Such a benign policy made good sense, according to Stephan Lindner, and therefore it was hard to dislodge. Foreign-owned factories contributed to the war effort to the same extent as others. Profits could not be repatriated owing to currency controls. A hard line would have invited retaliation not only in enemy nations but in many neutral countries, which, though subject to U.S.-British pressures, had maintained trade links to the Continent. In the event of a compromise peace, finally, a policy of forbearance and moderation might have protected the Reich from seizures like those following the First World War. Most of Lindner's account describes successive challenges to Reichskommissariat policy mounted by self-seeking Nazi economic factions like the Goring complex. The reader might have gained a fuller appreciation of what was at stake in these contests if, instead of recounting such essentially repetitious episodes, the author had compared specific instances of factory administration by each of the two sides in the struggle. Nevertheless, this dispassionate analysis is a welcome addition to a literature that helps explain why, except for victims of Nazi racism, business as usual was the usual business response in the Third Reich.

Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis

Introduction 1. The Origins of Racial Hygiene 2. Neutral Racism: The Case of Fritz Lenz 3. Political Biology: Doctors in the Nazi Cause 4. The Sterilization Law 5. The Control of Women 6. Anti-Semitism in the German Medical Community 7. The Destruction of Lives Not Worth Living 8. The Organic Vision of Nazi Racial Science 9. Medical Resistance: The Association of Socialist Physicians 10. The Politics of Knowledge Epilogue. Postwar Legacies Appendix A: German Medical journals under the Nazis Appendix B: University and Research Institutes Devoted to Racial Hygiene Bibliography Notes Index