“The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945”, by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann

404 pages, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0521398022

Yeah, so if you go to school long enough you accumulate a whole mess of books from all of those classes you took…provided, of course, that you don’t sell them back for pennies of what they’re worth. Would I have bought The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 if I hadn’t needed it for a class? I dunno…maybe if it were on the publisher’s remnants pile at Barnes & Noble? Anyway, this textbook by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann – the former a British author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects, the latter the same only, y’know, German – is a history of Germany ‘tween the years 1933 and 1945, and describes how the Nazis transformed a society that had been structured on differing classes into one structured on differing races. This book deals with the ideas and institutions that underpinned this mission and shows how Nazi policy affected various groups of people, both victims and beneficiaries. Burleigh and Wippermann begin with a serious discussion of the origins of Nazi racial ideology and then proceed to demonstrate the way in which this was translated into official policy, such as the systematic persecution not only of the Jews, but also with the fate of lesser-known groups such as Sinti and Roma, the mentally handicapped, the asocial and homosexuals.

One of the questions raised by Burleigh and Wippermann is whether or not the Nazis were modern or anti-modern (in their phraseology), but I don’t think they address it properly in this book. I think it’s common that many historians automatically revert to the aftermath of World War I to explain the rise of Nazism – which of course set the economic, political and social atmosphere in which the Nazis emerged – but I think its foundations go back further. Burleigh and Wippermann mention the Nazi’s ideological forbears, such as Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Goubineau and even of Wagner. These were all mid to late 19^th Century men, and three of them were dead before WWI even began. Even so, these men are among the few who are directly named by Hitler and other leading Nazis, such as Goebbels, as sources of inspiration. I don’t think that enough attention was paid to their contributions to Nazi ideology by Burleigh and Wippermann, and so it is rather pointless to debate whether-or-not the Nazis were modern or anti-modern without examining what anti-modern was or is (also, the term “anti-modern” itself is a rather awkward expression, anyway; perhaps “nostalgic” seems too positive a term to be associated with Nazis, but I think it is a more accurate term).

I think that objectivity is rare when studying the Third Reich, and for good reason: nobody wants to be accused of being a sympathizer – especially in this day and age where anyone to the right of Nelson Rockefeller is subjected to the most heinous abuse – but objectivity was something I felt was far lacking in Burleigh and Wippermann’s work. The harm in this is that it fails to present the Nazis’ ideology and the policies and programs that were shaped by it as the German people viewed it – and make no mistake, many accepted Nazi policies fanatically – but only from the victim’s point of view. I don’t believe in any nonsense brainwashing theories, especially in such a short span of time; besides, media mechanisms were not under full Nazi control until after 1933. Even so, Germany was a highly sophisticated, educated and politically active place with a chaotic democracy in the years before the Nazi rise, and that says something. I think that Burleigh and Wippermann do not pursue these concepts to their proper ends, which leads the interpretation of the Nazis’ rise to something of a highjacking by extremists who manipulated and lied their way into power. In fact, the Nazis were very articulate about what they believed often and in the open, from the Party Program which was written in 1920 (and made no mention of in Burleigh and Wippermann) to the extermination of the Jews and the conquest of Lebensraum to be found in the Soviet Union, as stated in Mein Kampf.