Dirk Rupnow

Racializing historiography: anti-Jewish scholarship in the Third Reich

ABSTRACT Despite continued debates about the role of German historians in the Third Reich, current scholarship views the work that was conducted under National Socialism under the rubric of Judenforschung (research on Jews) as a marginal and pseudo-scientific phenomenon. There has been no attempt to understand Judenforschung as a cohesive field of research or to locate it within intellectual history or the history of antisemitism. Nonetheless, this body of research, predominantly carried out in the humanities and the social sciences, established itself in the Nazi state with a number of institutions, and represents the most obvious intersection of historiography, antisemitic propaganda and National Socialist anti-Jewish ideology and politics. Rupnows essay, based on archival research, begins with an overview of Judenforschung and a general evaluation and assessment of its relevance and position with regard both to the National Socialist system and to its anti-Jewish policies. He then attempts to analyse it, and to define the specific mode of thinking that its various productions had in common, as well as to assess its function within the National Socialist system. The main focus of his study is the relationship between the humanities (deploying historical or non-biological concepts of ‘race’) on the one hand, and anthropology or racial biology (Rassenkunde) (deploying biological concepts of ‘race’) on the other. He raises and attempts to answer crucial and far-reaching questions about Judenforschung and its role in the Third Reich. Why was historical scholarship important for the perpetrators of the Holocaust? What was the specific function of historical arguments in a racist setting? What was the specific contribution of the humanities to racist arguments and racist politics? The article throws new light on the role that scholarship played in the Third Reich and its anti-Jewish policies, as well as on the complicity of scholars in the Holocaust.

Annihilating—Preserving—Remembering: The “Aryanization” of Jewish History and Memory During the Holocaust

Since the end of World War II, but especially over the last 20 years of debate about memory and representation, there has been suspicion that Germany’s National Socialists had planned not only to annihilate the Jewish people physically but also to obliterate them from history and memory–together with the traces of the persecution and the mass murder they had to suffer. Thus, the notion of genocide was occasionally modified and reinforced byconcepts intended to describe an alleged obliteration of memory and “murder of memory.” In contrast, projects and phenomena openly countering efforts to render the victims totally forgotten have received only isolated and inadequate attention. These projects are aimed instead at achieving a more advanced functionalization of the victims, one that goes even beyond extermination.