In March 1938, the German Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Austria. For the next seven years, this once sovereign nation existed as the Ostmark within the Greater German Reich. The degree to which the Anschluss and the start of World War II impacted Austria's juvenile criminal system, juvenile crime rates, and the types of crimes young people committed is the focus of Evan Burr Bukey's book.

Bukey's primary question throughout the study is this: “To what extent … did Nazi rule constitute a rupture in the Austrian juvenile justice system?” (157). His examination of Austria's treatment of juvenile defendants before, during, and after the Anschluss constitutes the book's greatest strength. The author begins in the nineteenth century, to underscore the “authoritarian and patriarchal” (11) nature of the 1852 penal code, identify the historical origins of the Juvenile Legal Support Agency, and document the formation of a legal view, one that would last into the 1960s, that juvenile offenders were “dangerous youth” rather than “endangered youth” (13). Shifting his focus to post–World War I Vienna, Bukey traces the creation of the Juvenile Court Law in 1928 and explains prosecutors’ and justices’ subsequent reliance on dossiers assembled by social workers, most of them unmarried women, whose job it was to offer a “social diagnosis” of the defendant (15).

Following the German invasion, the author notes, Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner was eager to “pass an all-encompassing Germanic Law” (18). Yet it was only on January 1, 1944, that a comprehensive Reich Juvenile Code took effect. This delay in legal uniformity was partly a consequence of opposition from Rudolf Hess and Hans Frick, the “resistance of economic and administrative officials,” and “a shortage of trained personnel” (9). It was also a result of Nazi jurists’ admiration for “authoritarian legal precepts” (10) in the Austrian criminal code.

Given that, in 1945, the restored Austrian government quickly repealed the Reich Juvenile Code, the author notes it is “debatable” whether this brief legal alignment signifies a “rupture in Austrian jurisprudence” (159). Although legal uniformity remained largely elusive, Nazi control did produce several important legal changes in Austria, including the introduction of People's Courts, special courts, and several wartime ordinances that “require[ed] courts to mete out justice according to social-biological diagnoses of the defendants” (43). One of these measures was the October 1939 Decree for the Protection of Dangerous Juvenile Criminals, which permitted courts to try youths between the ages of sixteen and eighteen as adults. Another was the September 1939 Decree against National Parasites. This measure detailed special punishments, including the death penalty, for anyone caught exploiting the conditions of war for self-enrichment.

Bukey's interest in identifying continuities and ruptures as well as documenting shifting crime rates inform the book's organization. Although chapter 1 examines the Austrian legal system prior to and immediately following the Anschluss, Bukey structures subsequent chapters around different types of sources. Chapter 2 surveys the surviving files of the higher regional court prior to 1944, chapter 3 reviews the case files of the special courts, chapter 4 examines Gestapo arrest records, chapter 5 studies the records of the higher regional court following the introduction of the 1944 Juvenile Criminal Code, and chapter 6 utilizes the files of the Viennese juvenile court to examine postwar prosecutions of juveniles arrested during the last months of Nazi control.

On one hand, this structure permits Bukey to work through different components of the juvenile criminal system, compare sentencing, and trace the impact that new ordinances and the 1944 Reich Juvenile Code had on prosecutions. His discussion of juvenile political crimes in chapter 4 is particularly interesting; it underscores how hundreds of young people, inspired by communism, Catholicism, and patriotism, attempted to defy or challenge Nazi annexation. On the other hand, the book's structure creates redundancy. Many chapters, for example, discuss property crimes and political crimes. A thematic structure might have been more effective and less repetitive. The book's organization also complicates Bukey's assessment of continuities and discontinuities. It is not until the book's last, brief chapter, titled “Final Thoughts,” that the author summarizes the impact Germany's annexation had on Austria's legal system. After the Anschluss and prior to the war, judges continued to use Austrian law to correct juveniles. After September 1939, Austrian courts enforced Nazi wartime decrees and ordinances. “In this respect,” he writes, “Austrian juvenile law was Nazified or 'coordinated' with that in the Third Reich” (158).

Bukey relies overwhelmingly on the documents that social workers, state prosecutors, Gestapo agents, and justices created. He uses these sources to re-create hundreds of legal cases and, chapter after chapter, impressively reconstruct the case files of numerous teenagers ensnared in the Nazi-Austrian legal system. Yet the author could have done more to interrogate and challenge these sources. Furthermore, given the important role social workers played in investigating defendants, Bukey's analysis would have benefited from a more detailed assessment of these personnel.

Although Bukey's primary interest is in tracing continuities and locating ruptures, his reading of arrest records and case files does raise interesting questions about why working-class youth constituted the “overwhelming majority of youngsters” charged with and prosecuted for various crimes (161). As he explains, many of these “miscreants” left school at age fourteen, quickly entered the job market, and came from single-parent homes (161). But his descriptions suggest that a reading of these files against the grain might facilitate the pursuit of interesting questions, such as: Where did working-class youth congregate and socialize? What was it like to be poor and parentless in war? What types of jobs did teenagers do in wartime industries? Did teenagers steal rabbits because the food situation was so dire in the war's last months or because these creatures were easily traded for other items?

Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna expands our knowledge about the juvenile justice system in Nazi-controlled Vienna and adds, both factually and geographically, to a growing body of scholarship examining juvenile criminal law in Nazi-controlled Europe. The book is likely to appeal to legal scholars and historians of youth and the Nazi empire.