Book Review: Christopher M. Hutton Race and the Third Reich Oxford: Polity Press, 2005, £55.00 hbk, £16.99 pbk (ISBN: 0—7456—3177—0), 272 pp

Abstract

Race and the Third Reich Oxford: Polity Press, 2005, £55.00 hbk, £16.99 pbk (ISBN: 0-7456-3177-0), 272 pp. ■ ■ Reviewed by Mel Wright, University of PlymouthChristopher Hutton's most recent publication critically addresses major questions relating to 'race' in Nazi Germany and places it 'within evolving intellectual and ideological landscapes'. He attempts to analyse various tensions, controversies, and uncertainties held by academic scientists by focusing on the central concept of Volk and synthesizing this with competing theories of German Identity. His intention is not to summarize the corpus of literature expounding on the institutional basis and implementation of the 'Final Solution' and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime; instead, he focuses on continuities and discontinuities of what he calls the 'popular misleading views' of dynamic and contentious Nazi ideological systems of power.Hutton's thesis begins by exploring the development of the modern science of race which arose out of the Enlightenment, and how anthropology sought to measure the morphological and biological anatomy of the human body, with its particular emphasis on paleoanthropology (human origin and evolution). Two key 'time-placed' theorists are reviewed here: Carl von Linné who first placed Homo sapiens 'within a zoological order', and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the founder of physical anthropology, who classified humanity into five distinct races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay.Using the French philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of 'power', Hutton suggests that racial disparity was figuratively organized as a product of modernity, and as such scientific and technocratic mastery were seen as 'involving the control and ultimate elimination of difference' as a flawed racist universalism. In modernity there was a sense of haste where old, traditional boundaries were disappearing. Traditional ecologies or natural orders, in which different racial and cultural variants of humanity had their own place, were breaking down. The 'essence of the past was being lost and a bastardized, mongrel and degraded humanity was emerging' in the modern Germanic civilization.During the Third Reich era, racial anthropology was marginalized in favour of the rising science of human genetics. Darwinism and neo-Darwinism provided a