Interwar Britain and German Racial Theory

Abstract

Over the past three decades, historians have uncovered vast amounts of new information about how Nazi domestic policies were perceived and interpreted beyond the Third Reich’s borders. Building on the pioneering work of scholars including Gisela Bock, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Garland Allen, Robert Jay Lifton, Jeremy Noakes and Mark B. Adams in the 1980s, recent researchers have added substantially to the scholarly understanding not only of how Nazi racial policies were implemented in Germany but also how foreign experts, particularly those in the United States and Great Britain, directly contributed to their formulation.¹ In parallel to this work, recent revisionist accounts of eugenics outside Germany have provided important new accounts of the origins of these ideas and how they developed in the interwar period.² The result of these two strands of historiography developing simultaneously was the increasing realization that Nazi racial theories and legislation were strongly linked to events and movements beyond the borders of the Third Reich. Some of the most important early research examining these links was put forward by Stefan Kühl, who concluded that eugenics societies around the world cultivated an extensive ‘Nazi connection’ with German racial hygienists through the 1930s.³ More recently, work by Marius Turda and Sheila Faith Weiss, along with the publication of the extensive Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, has begun to expand the scholarly understanding of eugenics beyond the traditional areas of interest into locations and contexts not previously considered, including Latin America, India, South Africa and Eastern Europe.⁴ In addition, Nathaniel C. Comfort’s work has situated the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century within the longer-term scientific quest for ‘human perfection’ that commenced long before, and continued beyond, the Second World War.⁵