The Racial State Summary

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Michael Burleigh is a Distinguished Research Professor in Modern European History at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Wolfgang Wippermann is a Professor of Historyat Freie Universitat, Berlin. Burleigh’s and Wippermann’s book, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, documents the link between Nazi policies and ideals, with focus on racialism as the most important aspect driving these issues. The Racial State examines the mission of Germany’s Nazi regime to reconstruct society based on racial criteria. The authors claim that the Nazi racial policy was deliberately set out to create an idealistic society in agreement with principles of race. The book starts by analyzing the Nazi racial ideology, then moves on to application of racial policies, and finishes with a few chapters on the victims of racism. The authors argue that the Third Reich was fundamentally different from other regimes because of the extensive nature of its racial policy. The argument focuses around the racially motivated social policies of the …show more content…
This book details the foundation of Hitler’s mission to create the “Ideal Society”. The book begins with the authors discussing the roots of Nazi ideology and its advancement to official policy. The importance of the title, The Racial State, is depicted in the chapters illustrating the persecution of the Jews, the Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), the mentally ill, the asocials, and homosexuals. Collectively these groups were perceived as threats to the Nazi vision of a purified and homogenous national community. The Jews were perceived as the chief threat and the others were seen as intolerable blemishes that were to be eliminated with uninhibited violence, ranging from sterilization to castration to abortion, and often fatal