This collection of essays is the result of a conference held in Oslo in 2009. The conferees compared case studies focusing on the development of racial science in occupied, allied, and puppet states in the Nazi sphere of influence during World War II. The volume aims to tie these studies together thematically, with each contributing author exploring in greater depth issues specific to his or her case study. The editors situate the volume in contrast to the dearth of “comparative analysis of Nazi racial policies in the occupied territories, especially in East Central Europe” (15). They identify five themes that, they claim, challenge interpretations of the existing scholarship: the prominence of racial science in interwar population policies; the significant impact of Nazi “divide-and-rule policy” on science research; the complexity of reasons for, as well as aspects of local support for, eugenics; the self-interested use of Nazi support by local radical regimes, which was sometimes at odds with Nazi ideology; and, finally, the inability of proponents of racial science to develop specific schools and a mass following.
Many scholars, including contributors to this volume, have, in fact, explored these issues over the past two decades. It is also the case that the historiography of eugenics in East Central Europe has been growing since the late 1990s, and comparativist scholars have taken sufficient note of this to include those findings in the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2012). What the editors of this book engage with is a historiography related to the Final Solution, which turns out to be of limited relevance to the individual contributions in the volume.
The collection fails to adhere to a common framework, and the individual pieces are uneven. While some contributions will be valuable to scholars interested in racial science in specific countries, the volume remains of limited use to nonspecialist audiences, as well as to those not already familiar with the history of the respective territories during the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, only a few case studies will be of use to scholars interested in comparative insights about racial science, as well as about the policies of the Nazi state in the territories it controlled or with which it was allied.
The editors aim to provide a useful historical background on what racial science had become by the late 1930s, focusing on Germany as the core of eugenicist and racial anthropological influences in Eastern Europe—even though the existing historiography has shown important connections between that region and other centers of medical and anthropological training in Europe (from France to Italy and the Habsburg Empire), as well as in the United States. The editors also focus on the historiography of the Final Solution and the debates between the so-called functionalists and intentionalists, but only a couple of contributors subsequently engage with this question. Finally, the section on the “American Connection” makes a claim that has been made many times before: interest in eugenics was not limited to illiberal authoritarian regimes, but was, in fact, mainstream in liberal democracies such as the United States. The one contribution that could have benefited from a comparison with racism and slavery in the United States—Wolfgang Bialas's chapter on Nazi ethics—is silent on this matter.
A few contributions in the volume shine, both in terms of the originality of their insights and their value as a point of departure for better understanding the history of a particular territory during World War II. Marius Turda offers a crisp, richly documented, and comparatively framed analysis of the development of racial science in Hungary as a continuation of important trends in Hungarian science and social policy from the interwar period. He analyzes the impact of Nazi Germany's occupation on the discourse and policies developed by the Hungarian wartime regime, concluding that the antisemitic racist ideas propagated by Hungarians during the war “ultimately provided legitimacy to the deportation of the Jews to Nazi extermination camps” (252). The purportedly close link between the writings of the Hungarian scientific and political elites, on the one hand, and the antisemitic views of the rank and file in Hungary, on the other, is not entirely persuasive. But it is clear that, at the very least, no counter-discourse regarding the Jews of Hungary developed; in addition, radical Hungarian rightwing politicians and racial scientists were fellow travelers of the Nazis.
Steffen Werther's piece on Danish racial science is also a fascinating case study. The tensions his analysis exposes between nationalism and racism—even when those ideologies were supposed to solidify an alliance among the racially “superior”—say a great deal about the value of these science projects for the politicians who controlled policy making. The willingness of the Danes to support the Nazi war effort with respect to population policies diminished greatly when they realized that Danish claims to racial superiority and an alliance with the Nazis would cost them control over their country.
Overall, this collection is uneven in terms of research, analysis, and the novelty of its insights, and thus does not add significantly to the relevant fields of historical inquiry. A more careful choice of case studies and insistence on the part of the editors that individual authors read and enter in a dialogue with each other would have helped make the comparativist points stronger. A different organization of the case studies and some clearer grounding of each case study in the relevant local context would have helped readers lacking great expertise about the respective countries.
