Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume I
- Abbreviations
- Maps
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume I
- 1 Historiography of the Holocaust: Early Developments
- 2 The Historiography of the Holocaust: The Years of Diversification and Integration
- 3 From “Final Solution” to “Holocaust”: Autobiographical Reflections
- 4 The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Origins of the Commensurability Problem
- 5 Fascism and Holocaust
- 6 The Holocaust and Modernity
- 7 Integrated Approaches and Boundaries in Holocaust Scholarship
- 8 Mapping the Holocaust
- 9 Archiving the Holocaust
- 10 Antisemitism in Interwar Europe
- 11 Race-Thinking, Völkisch-Nationalism, and Eugenics
- 12 Inter-ethnic Violence in Europe before the Holocaust
- 13 Communism and Anticommunism
- 14 Weimar Germany’s Vanishing Point: Politics, Violence, and the Rise of the Nazis, 1918–1933
- 15 Hitler and the Nazi Party
- 16 Hitler, State, and Party
- 17 Antisemitic Policy in the Early Years of the Third Reich
- 18 Popular Participation in Anti-Jewish Policy up to 1938
- 19 Nazi Biopolitics: Eugenics, Racial Policy, and the Persecution of “Asoziale,” 1933–1939
- 20 “Judenforschung”: Nazi Jewish Studies
- 21 Belonging and Belongings: The Dispossession of German Jews
- 22 Kristallnacht
- 23 Lebensraum, Autarky, and a New Imperial Order
- 24 International Responses to Nazi Race and Jewish Policy, 1933–1939
- Index
- References
19 - Nazi Biopolitics: Eugenics, Racial Policy, and the Persecution of “Asoziale,” 1933–1939
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume I
- Abbreviations
- Maps
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume I
- 1 Historiography of the Holocaust: Early Developments
- 2 The Historiography of the Holocaust: The Years of Diversification and Integration
- 3 From “Final Solution” to “Holocaust”: Autobiographical Reflections
- 4 The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Origins of the Commensurability Problem
- 5 Fascism and Holocaust
- 6 The Holocaust and Modernity
- 7 Integrated Approaches and Boundaries in Holocaust Scholarship
- 8 Mapping the Holocaust
- 9 Archiving the Holocaust
- 10 Antisemitism in Interwar Europe
- 11 Race-Thinking, Völkisch-Nationalism, and Eugenics
- 12 Inter-ethnic Violence in Europe before the Holocaust
- 13 Communism and Anticommunism
- 14 Weimar Germany’s Vanishing Point: Politics, Violence, and the Rise of the Nazis, 1918–1933
- 15 Hitler and the Nazi Party
- 16 Hitler, State, and Party
- 17 Antisemitic Policy in the Early Years of the Third Reich
- 18 Popular Participation in Anti-Jewish Policy up to 1938
- 19 Nazi Biopolitics: Eugenics, Racial Policy, and the Persecution of “Asoziale,” 1933–1939
- 20 “Judenforschung”: Nazi Jewish Studies
- 21 Belonging and Belongings: The Dispossession of German Jews
- 22 Kristallnacht
- 23 Lebensraum, Autarky, and a New Imperial Order
- 24 International Responses to Nazi Race and Jewish Policy, 1933–1939
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter examines Nazi policies that sought to “weed out” members of the population based on racial criteria (primarily targeting persons whom the Nazis classified as Jews, Sinti, or Roma), eugenic criteria (targeting individuals labeled as suffering from genetic diseases), or the criterion of deviance (targeting those whose deviance from social or sexual norms supposedly revealed their biological inferiority). The chapter argues that Nazi biopolitics was a contentious arena in which rivaling Nazi Party, state, and SS agencies competed for influence. This argument is developed by investigating three topics: Nazi sterilization policy; a protracted 1933−5 conflict between two competing racial theories and the impact of the conflict’s outcome on the drafting of racial legislation that culminated in the 1935 Nuremberg laws; and the 1937−8 turn to a biopolitical policy of “preventive detention” in concentration camps, on the orders of the police, which centralized efforts to round up “Asoziale,” a category that included beggars, vagrants, homeless persons, prostitutes, and potentially anyone exhibiting behavior considered socially deviant.
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- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust , pp. 393 - 419Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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