For the past three decades, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman's The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (1991) has provided a valuable explanatory framework for the racial and biopolitical nature of Nazi genocidal programs, and it has served as the go-to book for readers interested in Nazism's mosaic of victims. The authors used the concept of the racial state to illustrate the diverse interconnections between racial science and social programs in the Third Reich and to argue for the uniqueness of the regime, especially in the face of scholarship in the 1980s, which increasingly situated Nazi crimes as products of modernization. The editors of the present ambitious volume seek to update this paradigm by bringing together prominent scholars to discuss the multifaceted nature of Nazi racism. Their motivation lies in the concern that the racial state has become a convenient but often imprecise descriptor, one that incorrectly assumes a strict coherence among ideology, practice, and experience.

The editors state that they “seek to question the consensus over the power and coherence of Nazi racial ideology that established itself in the book's [The Racial State] wake in order to tackle many of the kinds of questions about science, rationality, and more generic features of the modern world that exercised the earlier volume from a different angle” (5). They recommend that scholars shift attention away from racial knowledge and toward racial discourse, to illuminate the unstable, often contradictory nature of persecutory policies. The volume's nineteen chapters, organized into five sections, take up this challenge in myriad, fascinating ways.

The first four chapters present comparative and historical perspectives. Mark Roseman suggests that “racial state” is not an inaccurate phrase—it just suggests that Nazi race thinking was more coherent and homogenous than it actually was. Roseman then takes a longer view to differentiate between “socially stratifying” and “nationally demarcating” racisms (48), arguing that genocide is more likely to come from nationalist than biological racism. Donald Bloxham traces the genealogy of Nazi ideas in a broader European context, seeing the genocidal policies of the Third Reich as a continuation of nineteenth-century population transfers, in which geopolitics loomed larger than racial ideology. In Bloxham's reading, the Holocaust occurred as part of a wider “unweaving of Europe” (10).

Pascal Grosse carefully draws links between the violence inherent in the colonial project, an “experiment with racialized political concepts” (104), and later genocidal policies, arguing that “the last phase of German colonialism created the intellectual matrix from which new notions of racialized empire-formation emerged” (109). Finally, Devin O. Pendas's broadly comparative chapter places the Nazi state on a “continuum of racializing regimes” (133) and argues that the relative absence of antisemitic discrimination based on skin color in Germany actually may have radicalized genocidal violence. Because the Jews evaded ready identification based on bodily markers, the Nazis perceived the societal threat from them to be greater. In the end, Pendas maintains, “Nazi racism was more radical because its target was different” (137).

The essays in the section titled “Race, Science, and Nazi Biopolitics” illustrate the heterogeneity of Nazi-era eugenic and racial-anthropology programs, by showing how social scientists competed for the favor of bureaucrats and ideologues. Richard Wetzell challenges Burleigh and Wipperman's argument in The Racial State that racial scientists created the conceptual framework for Nazi genocide. Instead, Wetzell describes a professional field categorized by infighting around competing concepts of race and heredity. Likewise, Dan Stone declares that race thinking is a more productive historical term than race science—scientists did not set the political agenda, but were more often left scrambling to make their theories fit preexisting prejudices. Christian Geulen argues further that the Nazis did not even really care whether their racial ideology was internally consistent or based on pseudo-scientific principles. He shows that, although the term race might have been everywhere in the Third Reich, it was not used consistently; indeed, it was often conflated with the nationalist usage of Volk. Herwig Czech illustrates how rarely the perpetrators of forced sterilization and euthanasia campaigns concentrated on the racial status of their victims. Instead, they focused on the socioeconomic burden supposedly posed by individuals deemed unworthy to the national community.

In the next section, “Anti-Semitism beyond Race,” Jürgen Matthäus closely examines the early years of the Reich Interior Ministry to demonstrate the extent to which anti-Jewish measures were often constrained by economic and diplomatic concerns. Richard Steigmann-Gall illustrates the multifaceted ways race thinkers layered older religious teachings onto newer categories of prejudice. Indeed, Steigmann-Gall argues that many Nazis wondered if Jews even constituted a separate race, which also explains why the Nazi mosaic of victims so closely mirrored traditional societal outgroups. Similarly, Dirk Rupnow shows how, after 1933, the field of research on the Jews (Judenforschung) failed to produce a coherent definition of scientific Antisemitism; instead, academic research into the Jewish question focused more on the supposed Jewish spirit and less on biological differences. Rupnow writes, “Even at the very moment when National Socialism was using racist ideas about human inequality for unprecedented ends, racial scientists could offer no reliable and definitive method of racial categorization in the absence of genetic proof. They turned to the past in order to categorize the present” (295).

Michael Wildt's intriguing chapter, which traces the evolving definition of Volksgemeinschaft, opens the section on “Race and Society.” People's diffuse use of the term both before and after 1933 shows that the concept of community meant different things to different people, and not everyone tied the concept to belonging to Aryanism. Nicholas Stargardt agrees that we need to interrogate the very descriptors that signified belonging in the Third Reich. What did it mean, he asks, if wartime patriotism was the thread that kept the German community together after 1939 rather than a well-defined notion of internal race enemies?

Martina Kessel continues this investigation of societal belonging by gauging everyday uses of humor. She argues, for instance, that Antisemitic jokes were always exclusionary, but not always racial in nature. Annette Timm's methodological chapter argues that scholars who ignore the history of emotions fail to consider how feelings of belonging operated in the Nazi state, crediting the Historikerinnenstreit debate for illuminating the necessity of applying a gendered analysis to the operative features of Nazi racism. Frank Bajohr examines the writings of foreign diplomats and finds that their perceptions of Hitler's Germany emphasized the chaotic and disorganized nature of the state. These men did not observe the orderly persecutory machine we assume by the phrase “racial state.” Furthermore, diplomatic reports did not tend to dwell on racist policies in Germany—perhaps, Bajohr suggests, because these policies were not very different from what the diplomats had witnessed at home.

In the volume's final section, “Race War? Germans and Non-Germans in Wartime,” Gerhard Wolf examines occupation policies in Poland and finds völkisch, rather than racial motivations behind most Germanization programs. Heinrich Himmler's dictates on anthropological racial screening in order to determine who belonged on the Deutsche Volksliste were controversial among Nazi planners and often blatantly ignored at the local level. Regina Mülhäuser's chapter showcases her groundbreaking work on wartime sexual encounters in the East, illustrating that for Nazi military planners, so-called miscegenation was a grave threat, but also one that could be ignored in favor of servicing male sexual needs. A close investigation of rape trials illustrates “the power of patriarchal attitudes to trump racist commitments” (21). Stefan Hördler illustrates the changing ethnic composition of camp hierarchies, especially as wartime labor needs increasingly competed with genocidal plans. By 1944, he argues, “Race was subordinated to bodily, fitness, professional skills, and language abilities in deciding which prisoners were to be deployed as laborers and which were to be murdered” (494).

Beyond the Racial State showcases an impressive range of research by top scholars in the field, though, notably, only three of the nineteen authors are women. The authors in this volume may be correct in arguing that Burleigh and Wipperman's racial state paradigm has not fully stood up to three decades of research. Nevertheless, the original volume remains instrumental in highlighting non-Jewish victim groups, such as the Roma and Sinti, Black Germans, same-sex desiring men and women, and so-called asocials, something this volume largely neglects to do. That said, the editors are to be applauded for pulling together this fascinating and important work, a much-needed intervention in the scholarship, and one that will demand reexamination of the very ways we understand the inner workings of Nazi racial ideologies.