This collected volume does not mince words about the role German academics played in the Nazis' crimes. At the very outset Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch explain, “Humanities scholars not only sanctioned state actions, but also contributed fundamentally to the process of placing border and population conflicts onto the political agenda.” They went “so far as to support genocide” (p. xix). The book's thirteen chapters mainly focus on particular scholars and their roles in theorizing, promoting, and recording Nazi racial policies. Some of these men worked within core Nazi Germany, but a number either followed the German army abroad or welcomed the Wehrmacht as it entered their native lands. Chapters on individual scholars or specific regions may be of interest primarily to specialists, but the sum total is a book that every historian of the period should consult.

The book engages us on several levels. First, it details how a generation of historians contributed the intellectual justification for the Nazi claim to Lebensraum in eastern Europe. Second, the book illustrates how many of those scholars jumped at the opportunity to move from theory to practice. The collection's authors thoroughly document the roles contemporary scholars played in Germany's campaigns of conquest and genocide. Third, the articles point to the willful postwar amnesia of West German scholars toward their own and their colleagues' war guilt. The book makes clear that Ostforschung was no detour from the path of German historiography. It not only built upon the efforts of an earlier generation, but its practitioners also continued to work after the war and trained many of Germany's greatest postwar historians.

As several authors acknowledge, two decades ago Michael Burleigh addressed the responsibility of scholars for ethnic cleansing and genocide in Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). In the subsequent years a new cohort of primarily younger German scholars has exposed the failure of an earlier generation to uncover the crimes of its forebears (and mentors). Despite these publications, this collection is still a timely and important book for the reason that Georg C. Iggers succinctly states in his forward: “The great contribution of this volume is that for the first time it makes available to an English reading public the results of the extensive scholarship of the last decade and a half on the role that German scholars played in the programs of ethnic cleansing” (p. viii).

The collection is replete with many interesting case studies, but unfortunately space permits only a few to be mentioned here. In the first chapter, Haar lays bare the hypocrisy of Theodor Schieder. Schieder is best known to posterity as the editor of the multivolume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (Bonn: Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, 1953–1957), a source frequently used in subsequent decades to document and condemn the postwar expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe. Haar reveals another side to Schieder: the German historian's autumn 1939 reports from conquered Poland in which he warned of the “dangers of ethnic intermixing” and called for the “detachment of Jewry” (p. 14). In his 1942 reports from Bialystock, Schieder commented positively on the ghettoization of the region's Jews (p. 19). That a proponent of wartime ethnic cleansing became the central organizer of a project to condemn its postwar manifestation is just one of the many ironies embedded in the debate about the expulsions of Germans from eastern Europe.

In chapter three Eric J. Schmaltz and Samuel D. Sinner detail the wartime activities of Karl Stumpp, a German émigré from the Soviet Union who returned during the war to investigate the demographic and social conditions of his former compatriots. In his efforts to promote his people, Stumpp developed an original theory of local German resiliency that enabled the local population to survive Stalinist famine and purges intact and unmixed. All statistical evidence to the contrary, he promoted this theory as a means to defend the local German communities against Nazi accusations that they were the impure product of Sovietization and racial intermixing. Although the main conclusions may be called into question, Stumpp's ethnographic research on German villages inadvertently provide substantial documentation of the thorough deportation and murder of the region's Jews.

Although no book's coverage can be total, the authors offer examples from across the continent. For example, in chapter five Christof Morissey illustrates that in Slovakia German officials aimed to create a new scholarship to mold the diverse German ethnic communities of the Carpathian region into a single “Southeastern European Germandom.” Though started by locals, the project quickly became the province of Sudeten Germans imported from Bohemia—a striking example of how the Bohemian subordination of Slovakia did not end with the collapse of Czechoslovakia. Other chapters examine the roles of German scholars in Slovenia, Romania, Denmark, Poland, and abroad.

In retrospect, the wartime debasement of scholars is not as shocking as their postwar rehabilitation and the subsequent silence of their peers and students. Nearly all of the chapters end with a brief nod to academic life in the Federal Republic, but few explore why and how the historical profession ignored the crimes of individual scholars and thus whitewashed the collective guilt of the German academy. The book also does not address the heated debate that the authors' previous works have caused in Germany. To their credit the editors do not engage in a pseudo-debate with apologists, but a summary of these recent controversies would have helped to emphasize the great value of this volume.