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24 results

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  • 19 - Nazi Biopolitics: Eugenics, Racial Policy, and the Persecution of “Asoziale,” 1933–1939

  • Edited by Mark Roseman, Indiana University, Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
    Published online:
    16 May 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025, pp 393-419

  • 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.

Beyond the Racial State
  • Rethinking Nazi Germany
  • Edited by Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, Richard F. Wetzell
  • Published online:
    10 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • 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.

Criminals and their Scientists
  • The History of Criminology in International Perspective
  • Edited by Peter Becker, Richard F. Wetzell
  • Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2006
  • This book presents research on the history of criminology from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century in Western Europe (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy) and in Argentina, Australia, Japan, and the United States. Approaching the history of criminology as a history of science and practice, the essays examine the discourse on crime and criminals that surfaced as part of different discourses and practices, including the activities of the police and the courts, parliamentary debates, media reports, as well as the writings of moral statisticians, jurists, and medical doctors. In addition, the book seeks to elucidate the relationship between criminological discourse and politics, society, and culture by providing a comparative study of the worldwide reception of Cesare Lombroso's criminal-anthropological ideas.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Peter Becker, European University Institute, Florence, Richard F. Wetzell, German Historical Institute, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Criminals and their Scientists
    Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2006, pp 1-22

  • Summary

    The chapters gathered in this book under the title Criminals and Their Scientists seek to contribute to a history of criminology as discourse and practice. They do not follow established models of genealogical reconstructions of criminology as a set of ideas. Although famous representatives of the canon of criminological theories, such as Cesare Lombroso, figure prominently in many of the chapters, such icons of “scientific progress” in the study of crime are discussed not as isolated thinkers, but as participants in a polyphonic discourse with close ties to penal institutions. To avoid the danger of replacing a genealogical with an exclusively social historical perspective, the chapters herein approach criminology as a discursive practice. To be sure, the institutional settings that provided the stage for different criminological actors play an important role in our stories. But professionalization and the institutionalization of criminology as a recognized scientific field and later as an academic discipline cannot fully account for the continuities and ruptures in the history of the study of crime and criminals. Nor can the discursive and institutional strategies of criminologists be explained by a conceptual framework that focuses on divergent class interests.

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