The spread and impact of Fascism and Nazism on minorities in East Central and Southeastern Europe in the interwar period and World War II has long been a neglected aspect of the study of far-right ideologies. The essays collected in this volume represent a cross section of the current work on this issue in German and Eastern European academia. They merit attention for their combined efforts to answer the question of why ideologies of the radical right—which usually go hand in glove with majority groups' projects of nation-building and consolidation—also appeal to national minorities. The minorities under examination are ethnic Germans in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Yugoslavia, ethnic Hungarians in Romania, and Jews in Yugoslavia.

In the introductory essay, Daniel Ursprung suggests that the study of Fascism as a totalitarian ideology or even a political religion is not a useful approach when studying Fascist movements among European minorities, which lack the dimensions of state-building and one-party dictatorship that define the Italian and German models. Instead, Ursprung draws on Roger Griffin's concept of Fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism” (25) in order to posit a more dynamic and flexible interpretative model, which both embraces the notion of generic Fascism and allows for great regional variation depending on sociopolitical conditions, the internal dynamics of any single ethnic minority, and the attitude of the host nation to Nazi Germany.

The essays on the Romanian ethnic Germans (focusing especially on the Transylvanian Saxons) emphasize the role of the Catholic and Lutheran Churches as agents of social organization and transmission of ideas. As Thomas Şindilariu cogently explains, this minority group's affinity for rightist ideologies promising social and ethnic integration can be related to its isolation from both the mainstream of European political thought and from Romanian nation-building policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Cornelia Schlarb discusses confessional differences in the Romanian ethnic Germans' perception of the Nazi rise to power, with the Catholic Church initially taking a more combative stance only to change tack after the signing of the Reichskonkordat in 1933, whereas the Lutherans showed both a greater tolerance for Nazi abuses of power and a greater willingness to debate the compatibility of Christian theology with Nazi ideology. Pierre de Trégomain's essay on the period 1944–1948 shows how even in the aftermath of liberation the Lutheran Church continued to mold a shrinking public sphere and act as the voice of a beleaguered minority. These essays demonstrate clearly the broad array of opinions and perceptions of Nazism that existed within the ranks of a single minority.

In addition to churches, the role of political parties and organizations is emphasized in the essays by Franz Sz. Horváth on the radicalization of the ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Carl Bethke on the ethnic Germans in Croatian Slavonia. Horváth's essay demonstrates that large sections of the ethnic Hungarian community shifted very gradually toward the far right, with open enthusiasm for Nazi methods becoming apparent only in the late 1930s under the dual impact of Hitler's support for Hungarian border revision and the polarization of Romanian politics after the end of the last National Liberal government in December 1937. Similarly, parts of the Slavonian ethnic German community were attracted to Nazism—in contradiction of their traditional identification with Catholicism and Croatian state education—only under the impact of social activism by Nazified compatriots, who eventually dominated the Kulturbund (the main Yugoslav ethnic German organization) in 1938–1939. This Europe-wide pattern of radicalization toward the right in the late 1930s affected many, but by no means all, minority groups in Eastern Europe, as is borne out by Meinholf Arens and Daniel Bein's essay on the mostly Hungarian-speaking, Catholic Tschangos of Romanian Moldova, who continued to express a religious, prenational identity despite attempts by the Hungarian government to have them resettled to Hungary as late as 1944.

With the exceptions of Olga Schroeder-Negru's essay on the 1924 Tatarbunary Uprising in Bessarabia, Zoran Janjetović's overview of the ethnic German community in Vojvodina, and Ivo Goldstein's essay on the Holocaust in Croatia—all of which sacrifice a broader interpretative framework to narrative microhistory—the essays in this volume strike a balance between the use of theories of generic Fascism and the need to pay attention to the intricacies of specific milieus. This balanced approach makes them both fascinating case studies and insightful examinations of the broader patterns of minority politics and radicalization in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.