Bukey's history introduces the most important insights and revelations regarding the Nazi persecution of intermarried couples (“full” Jews married to Gentiles) and their “half-Jewish” children in recent years. Studying the case in Vienna, Bukey draws from a range of primary sources including interviews and in particular court records. His scholarship effectively balances big-picture analysis with humanizing details of personal life. Often commendably readable, it is rife with cases of illicit love affairs, “interracial” marriage, and divorce, all policed by the Gestapo and ordinary snoops, and daring deceptions told to escape Nazi persecution. It overflows with a hundred stories, many rich in salacious details that in another time could have kept any advice columnist very busy, but which during National Socialism ended up before German judges as the basis for life-and-death rulings that Bukey uses to dissect the experiences of intermarried couples and their children, “Mischlinge.”

The imports of Bukey's work lie on various levels, from his findings on Vienna and their value for critiquing evolving scholarship on what he calls “mixed families” to the implication that higher education often enabled rather than hindered Nazi crimes. Established conventions and methods of judges, like those of other professionals, enabled Nazi crimes. Judges painstakingly applied formal legal reasoning to the irrational objectives of the new Reich, meticulously reviewing, for example, morphological signs to determine whether someone was Jewish (reaching precise conclusions such as that only twenty-seven percent of the plaintiff's features were suspect, p. 69). Bukey includes a number of clarifying charts, rare for historians in this field that reveal relevant trends in Vienna.

The author demonstrates peculiarities of Austrian history, not only because the country was drawn overnight into the system of persecution that had developed in Germany for years but also because Austria was sometimes a testing ground for cutting-edge developments of Nazi persecution (a November 1938 order discharging all Austrians married to Jews or half Jews preceded Hitler's order to the same effect for the military as a whole more than one year later, pp. 46–47). At the same time Bukey's case study corroborates or modifies current conclusions on the subject. Thus he confirms that “contemporary scholarship has revealed that the Nazi regime approached the question of mixed marriages with hesitation and uncertainty. The primary reason was Hitler's fear of arousing social unrest among Aryan relatives, such as that which eventually erupted in the Rosenstrasse incident of February 1943” (p. 2). On the one hand, the small number who were outliers by virtue of their intermarriages were ideal targets for the regime's pressures of economic necessity and social conformity. On the other hand, the ties of their primary relationships girded them with extraordinary motivations for resisting these forms of coercion.

Important as well is Bukey's evidence on the percentage of Reich Jews who survived Nazi Germany because they were intermarried, and the percentage of intermarried couples that divorced during the Nazi period. (Calculations here apply only to persons the Reich had identified as Jews and intended to persecute, just as calculations on Mischlinge apply only to persons the Reich had been able to identify as such). “Kaplan estimates that 99 percent of Jews who did not emigrate from Hitler's Reich survived in mixed unions.” Bukey cites Emil Tuchmann, the Health Services Director for the Vienna Jewish Community, who reported in mid-April 1945 that “96 percent of the city's surviving Jews lived in mixed marriages.” A “survey taken in September of 1944 by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland” cited by this author indicated that “some 98 percent of officially registered ‘full’ German Jews” who had not yet been deported were intermarried, a percentage that likely varied little by the end of the war since evidence indicates that intermarried Jews did not die disproportionately compared to other Jews but in general survived following September 1944, despite orders such as that of the RSHA in January 1945 for the deportation of intermarried Jews (pp. 83, 189–190). Bukey's study adds as well to known data on the percentage of intermarried couples who divorced, evidence that is fragmented due to incomplete documentation and limited studies. Ursula Büttner in Die Not der Juden teilen. Christlich-jüdische Familien im Dritten Reich estimated that 7.2 percent of intermarried couples divorced during the Nazi years in Baden Württemberg while 9.9 percent divorced in Hamburg between 1942 and 1945. Beate Meyer in “Jüdische Mischlinge.” Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung 1933–1945 concluded that probably “more than twenty percent” of these couples had divorced in Hamburg (see “Jüdische Mischlinge,” p. 73, cited in Bukey as p. 66). Concerning mixed marriages in Vienna, Bukey calculates as “reasonably certain” that following the Anschluss only “5 to 7 percent divorced” (pp. 94, 191); “93 percent of German Gentile women stood by their Jewish men,” while among “partial Jews” applying to elevate their “racial status,” eighty-four percent succeeded (p. 196).

Intermarried couples in Vienna survived to such an unusual degree “primarily” due “to concern for civilian morale, although in several cases factors such as employment in war-essential enterprises seem to have come into play” (p. 199). To avoid “needless difficulties,” as Hitler put it (p. 142), the dictatorship willingly exempted intermarried Jews from the genocide and compromised its racial ideology in the other direction by punishing Gentiles married to Jews. Thus the history of Nazi genocide corroborates studies of genocide throughout history (see Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil, p. 34) showing that a perpetrating state characteristically excludes some members of the targeted group to consolidate support or ameliorate dissent.

The history of intermarriages and their Mischling children provides an important venue for the study of National Socialism because these persons tested the implementation of the racial ideology at its core, causing the dictatorship to compromise and make exceptions. To break troublesome groups into more manageable units, the regime by 1938 had configured six main possible categories for persons in “mixed families,” two for each of the parents and two for each child. These families came to the attention of authorities in the prominent way Bukey illustrates because they brought together persons Nazi ideology had to treat very differently. Because in ideology these categories represented different degrees of threat to the important “racial purification” program, they, in turn, signaled different degrees of compromise. By tracing the history of each category separately, we can assess the extent of the regime's willingness to make policy exceptions that it rationalized as “temporary” on its most basic tenet of race, and the reasons for it. As Bukey writes, research on the subject remains “embryonic” (p. 84).

Future work could reveal the extent to which the regime chose to rule domestically by compromise, even up to the last months of the war.