Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany

The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'être, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

Devin O. Pendas is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the history of Holocaust trials after World War II and the history of international law and mass violence. His publications include The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge, 2006) and Political Trials in History and Theory (co-edited, Cambridge, 2017).

Mark Roseman is Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in History at Indiana University. Trained at Cambridge and Warwick Universities in the UK, he has taught in the UK and the USA. His books include The Past in Hiding (2000), The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (2002), and Jewish Responses to Persecution 1933–1946, Volume 1 (with Jürgen Matthäus, 2010).

Richard F. Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. Trained at Swarthmore College, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and has taught at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and the Catholic University of America. His research focuses on the intersection of law, science, and politics in modern Germany. His publications include Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (2000), Engineering Society (co-edited, 2012), and Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (2014).