A history of the T4 program, or "euthanasia program", in Nazi Germany - that is, the murder of handicapped persons by the Nazis. This program was preceded by the politicization of science, which incorporated popular prejudices into "scientific" theories and declared some individuals and even "racial" groups, like Jews and Gypsies, to be "valueless"; by the eugenic movement; and by the misuse of scientific hypotheses by politicians. The policy of exclusion of the "racially inferior" stood at the center of the Nazi utopia. The "euthanasia program", implemented in 1939-40, paved the way for the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies in 1942-44. Many of those involved in the T4 program (e.g. Franz Stangl) were later involved in the operation of the death camps. Special attention is devoted to the murder of handicapped Jews. These, progressively excluded from the public welfare system and from the medical institutions, were concentrated in 1939-40 in special Jewish hospitals and later killed in the course of the "euthanasia program".

In Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 to 1950, Atina Grossmann reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources - from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores - the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's rights to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education. Reforming Sex takes on questions of international context and comparison as well as continuity and discontinuity in twentieth century German history in a manner that other studies have not. The book follows Weimar sex reformers into the Third Reich, to exile around the world, and into both the Eastern and Western zones of postwar Germany. It demonstrates how deeply rooted eugenics ideology and American and Bolshevik models of modernity were in the Weimar movement. It also examines the drastic rupture between sex reform notions of social health and National Socialist population policy. The story of German sex reform provides a new perspective on post-World War II family planning programs; it sheds light on the long and lively background to current controversies about abortion, the role of doctors and the state in determining women's right to control their own bodies, and the possibilities for reforming and transforming sexual relations between men and women.

What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks—arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany—the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity. After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration—and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate—are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole. --

Fatherlands explores the nature of identity in nineteenth-century Germany, and has crucial implications for our understanding of nationalism, German unification and the German state in the modern era. It approaches these questions from a new and important angle, that of the non national territorial state, exploring the state-building process in non-Prussian Germany. The issues covered range from railway construction and German industrialization, to the modernization of German monarchy, the emergence of a free press, the development of a modern educational system, and the role of monuments, museums and public festivities.

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