UBC: Burleigh & Wippermann, The Racial State

[truepenny]

The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is dry and slow going, but a fascinating read. It's an examination of Nazi social policy through the lens of their crazy racist ideology. The authors get points for putting words like "Aryan" and "gypsy" in quotation marks every single time and for their refreshingly dour assessment of some of their more out-there colleagues. They are less interested in the concentration camps themselves than in how people got sent to the concentration camps: how you got judged to be "asocial," for instance. They also talk a good deal about the "euthanasia" program and compulsory sterilization and the ways in which seemingly "progressive" policies were actually nothing of the sort. The Nazis didn't have services for single mothers because they supported the rights of women to make choices about their own bodies. They supported "Aryan" single mothers whose babies had "Aryan" fathers, because they were obsessed with the need to produce more "Aryan" babies. If you had the great misfortune to be a Polish single mother in Germany, odds were very good that you'd end up in a detention camp and your baby would end up either taken away from you to be put in a good German home (if deemed, in the immediate aftermath of its birth to be "Aryan" enough) or dead (if deemed not).

They also talk about "resistance" and whether there was or wasn't any in various sectors of the German population. Mostly there wasn't (they find before Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and in much less dramatic language); people agreed with the Nazis' racist ideas or didn't disagree or were interested either in self-advancement or self-protection. There are a number of reasons that all come down to the same thing: active or passive support of the Nazi regime. Resistance in Germany was fragmentary, disorganized, and of course ruthlessly destroyed when discovered (including the Nazi habit of killing the families of those they apprehended).

Reading about the Nazis is always horrifying and fascinating in somewhat equal measures, and this book is no exception.



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