ACCLAIM FOR
 MARK MAZOWER’s
 DARK CONTINENT
 “Compelling.… A lively account of Europe in the twentieth century.”
 —The Wall Street Journal
 “Fine and fascinating.… Mazower uses his considerable skills to look deep into the heart of
 European darkness, and he does not flinch from what he finds.”
 —Chicago Tribune
 “Mark Mazower has provided a rich mixture in his highly individual and intelligent
 interpretation of Europe’s twentieth-century history.”
 —The Times Literary Supplement
 “Mazower has written a timely, argumentative, and ultimately optimistic book; he is
 particularly good at illuminating the substance of beliefs beneath ideologies.”
 —The New Yorker
 “An absorbing and challenging history of Europe in the twentieth century.… [Mazower] is a
 skilled analyst and persuasive writer.”
 —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 “Fascinating.…”
 —The Washington Times
MARK MAZOWER
 DARK CONTINENT
 Mark Mazower has taught at the University of Sussex and Princeton, and is Professor of
 History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of the prize-winning
 Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944.
ALSO BY
 MARK MAZCWER
 Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis
 Inside Hitler’s Greece:
 The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44

Copyright © 1998 by Mark Mazower
 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
 Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
 New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
 Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Allen Lane/
 The Penguin Press, an imprint of the Penguin Group, London and
 subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
 a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.
 Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to
 reprint previously published material:
 Harcourt Brace & Company: Map, “The Expulsion of Germans from Central Europe, 1945–1947,” from Europe in the Twentieth
 Century, 2nd ed., by Robert O. Paxton, copyright © 1985 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Reproduced by permission of the
 publisher. Helicon Publishing Limited: Two maps, “Retreat of Ottoman Power in Europe” and “Russia in the Great War,” from
 The History of Europe by J. M. Roberts, copyright © 1996 by Helicon Publishing Limited. Reproduced by permission of the
 publisher. Penguin Books Limited: Map, “The Multinational Empire, 1878–1916,” from The Hapsburgs: Embodying Empire by
 Andrew Wheatcroft (Viking, 1995), copyright © 1995 by Andrew Wheatcroft. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. The
 University of Chicago Press: Table 2.1, “Foreign Population in Selected European Countries,” from Limits of Citizenship by
 Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, copyright © 1994 by The University of Chicago Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
 The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
 Mazower, Mark.
 Dark Continent: Europe’s twentieth century / Mark Mazower.—1st American ed.
 p. cm.
 1. Europe — History — 20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
 D424.M39 1998
 940.55 — DC21 98–15886
 eISBN: 978-0-307-55550-2
 Author photograph © by Johanna Weber
 www.vintagebooks.com
 v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
 About the Author
 Other Books by This Author
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Preface
 1. The Deserted Temple: Democracy’s Rise and Fall
 2. Empires, Nations, Minorities
 3. Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies
 4. The Crisis of Capitalism
 5. Hitler’s New Order, 1938–45
 6. Blueprints for the Golden Age
 7. A Brutal Peace, 1943–9
 8. Building People’s Democracy
 9. Democracy Transformed: Western Europe, 1950–75
 10. The Social Contract in Crisis
 11. Sharks and Dolphins: The Collapse of Communism
 Epilogue: Making Europe
 Maps and Tables
 Notes
 Guide to Further Reading
THREE
 Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies
Ten Commandments for Choosing a Spouse:
 1. Remember that you are German.
 2. If of sound stock, do not remain unwed.
 3. Keep your body pure.
 4. Keep spirit and soul pure.
 5. As a German, choose someone of German or Nordic blood for your partner.
 6. When choosing your spouse, look into their lineage.
 7. Health is a precondition of external beauty.
 8. Marry only out of love.
 9. Seek not a playmate but a partner in marriage.
 10. Wish for as many children as possible.
 —FROM THE HAUSBUCH FÜR DIE DEUTSCHE FAMILIE (BERLIN, N.D.)
 These tips for domestic harmony came near the beginning of the Handbook for the German
 Family, which the Nazi authorities routinely issued to every young couple. Its excellent
 collection of recipes was accompanied by advice on childcare, on looking after the home,
 diet and racial health. A special section summarized the Nuremberg laws and carried helpful
 charts to clarify family bloodlines and to investigate genealogies contaminated by marriage
 with Jews. Domestic health and happiness—readers were reminded—were no longer merely
 a matter for individual choice and satisfaction. Weimar’s self-centred liberalism had been
 replaced by National Socialism’s concern for the community as a whole. Before the recipes
 came a useful saying of the Führer: “If one lacks the strength to struggle for one’s own
 health, one loses the right to life in this world of struggle.”
 Such a book shows us values which had not only penetrated German life, but were also
 part of a much broader European discourse about national and family health in the inter
war years. The Third Reich might have taken this discourse to new extremes, and
 highlighted the role of race in a way unmatched elsewhere. But the idea that family health
 concerned society more generally, that the nation needed racially sound progeny, that the
 state should therefore intervene in private life to show people how to live—all this ran right
 across the political spectrum of inter-war Europe, reflecting the tensions and stresses of an
 insecure world in which nation-states existed in rivalry with one another, their populations
 decimated by one war and threatened by the prospect of another.
 Fears for national strength were reinforced by the long-term decline in birth rates which
 had set in before the First World War. “The attention of many European governments has
 been called to the decreasing birth rate of the white races during the last decades,” noted an
 Italian journalist in 1937. “Most biologists, economists and politicians fully endorse the
 view that numbers are the strength of the Nation.” After 1918, the state tried to correct this
 trend by setting up Health Ministries and promoting family values. People were encouraged
 and exhorted to have more babies, while abortion and contraception were discouraged or
 criminalized. Living and housing conditions were improved, as were municipal amenities
for the masses. Physical fitness was promoted through swimming in the new public lidos,
 rambling in the countryside or cycling during extended paid holidays.
 But the development of social policy had a darker side as well: safeguarding the “quality”
 as well as the quantity of the nation’s human stock—as doctors, scientists and policy-makers
 recommended—implied reducing the dangers to public health. These were not only slums,
 poverty and malnutrition; they also encompassed the physically and mentally ill, who were
 shut away, sterilized or even in the extreme case killed for the greater good of society.
 Juvenile delinquents or the sexually promiscuous were also seen as jeopardizing family
 stability and public order. And sometimes the threat to the nation was defined even more
 broadly in terms of an entire class—as in the so-called “social problem group,” which
 supposedly existed in inter-war Britain—or in terms of race. The Third Reich combined
 biological anti-Semitism with a highly efficient state apparatus to produce the most modern
 form of this kind of racial welfare state in Europe.
 As we now know, Sweden, Switzerland and several other European countries continued to
 employ sterilization and other coercive measures in social policy until relatively recently.
 Such practices make Hitler’s Germany look less exceptional and closer to the mainstream of
 European thought than once seemed possible. Nevertheless, the similarities should not be
 exaggerated. The Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (or People’s Community) was promoted through
 what one social commentator called the “life-ensuring state,” but of course this “life
ensuring state” also believed it was necessary to take the life of others, expropriating their
 goods and redistributing them for the benefit of those inside the nation. Its emergence
 prompted both imitators (as in Italy) and critics—especially in Britain—who attacked the
 idea that racism had any basis in science, or more generally that social policy ought to be
 made on the basis of coercion. The Second World War became a struggle to define the
 relationship between the community as a whole, the individual citizen and social policy,
 paving the way for the very different forms of welfare state which would emerge after
 1945. Fascist welfare states taught democrats the lesson that granting individual liberties
 was not enough to secure people’s loyalties in an era of mass politics. Hitler’s defeat would
 allow democracy to root itself once more in European life through a new sense of social
 solidarity and national cohesion.
 WAR AND THE DESTRUCTION OF BODIES
 Somewhere above eight million men lost their lives in the First World War—over 6,000
 deaths each day of the conflict. With the casualties suffered as a result of the Russian
 Revolution, of flu, typhus and of the other conflicts that continued into the early 1920s,
 probably as many as thirteen million Europeans died. France lost one in ten of its active
 male population, Serbia and Romania even more.
 Most of the dead were young men, whose absence in post-war Europe had profound and
 devastating consequences for those who remained. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering
 researcher into human sexuality, described the war as the “greatest sexual catastrophe ever
 suffered by civilised Man.” During the fighting gender roles had already changed
 dramatically, as women and children fended for themselves without husbands or fathers.
 After 1918 the traditional family came under even greater strain: by then there were around
 500,000 war widows in Germany alone, most of whom would never remarry.1
To millions of other women, the men who came home from the war carried the physical
 and mental scars of their experiences. They were “destroyed men” (in a contemporary
 phrase) and “wounded patriarchs.” Incapable of reintegration into civilian life, haunted by
 wartime memories, many committed suicide—rates rose fast at the end of the war—drank
 themselves into oblivion or tried to reassert their authority by beating their wives and
 children. While governments erected noble monuments to commemorate the dead,
 mutilated veterans begged at street corners or looked for work. Given this battering
 inflicted by total war upon Europe’s traditional patriarchal family, it is not surprising that
 there was much talk of “youth running wild” in a newly “fatherless community.” The crisis
 atmosphere of 1918/19 with insurrections, revolution and mutinies, increased the sense of a
 complete collapse of social order. “The revolution and its consequences have been
 particularly harmful for the psyche of many people, particularly of youth,” observed a
 Prussian civil servant. “The foundations have been shattered. State institutions have almost
 completely lost their authority, as has the Church. The educational influence of parents has
 often been reduced to nil.”2
 As again after the Second World War, such anxieties provoked the state to act more and
 more as surrogate parent and fount of moral authority. As divorce rates rose sharply, it
 reasserted the values of family cohesion—since “moral order,” in Mussolini’s words,
 produces “public order”—in order to show women and children their proper place. “A
 nation is not a collection of individuals placed beside one another; it is a group of
 interlocking families,” insisted the Radical French politician Édouard Herriot in 1919. “The
 organic cell is not the individual but the family.” It was, in other words, not just the Right
 which felt the vital importance of restoring the family—and if necessary checking
 individualism—for the sake of the nation’s well-being.3
 All this meant exorcizing a frightening apparition which had emerged during the war—
 the independent and emancipated young woman with her own place in the labour force
 and her own income. Tuppence Beresford, for instance—the heroine of Agatha Christie’s
 1922 thriller The Secret Adversary—who had been a wartime nurse, entered the post-war
 world with new demands for equal work opportunities, sexual independence and an active
 life. Despite the reality of growing female employment, however, especially in new service
 industries, role models like Tuppence were increasingly denounced as manifestations of
 “sexual Bolshevism,” threatening the traditional authority of the male. The garçonnes of the
 1920s, Bright Young Things with their bobbed hair and slim hips, were accused of
 displaying a selfish love of pleasure, and a frightening disregard for the nation’s future.
 “Smoking, wearing short hair, dressed in pyjamas or sportswear … women increasingly
 resemble their companions,” wrote an alarmed Frenchman. How could such androgynes
 ever be turned into responsible mothers?4
 To such suspicions there was a nervous political undertone. The Bolsheviks had opened up
 breathtaking vistas in relations between the sexes, swiftly emancipating Russian women to
 an extent unparalleled anywhere else in Europe—curbing the power of the Church,
 sweeping away traditional patriarchal privileges and allowing women to sue for divorce.
 Some Soviet policy-makers even talked about eventually abolishing marriage altogether and
 encouraging free unions of men and women; not surprisingly, critics believed that the war
torn Russian family was being encouraged to “wither away,” together with the other
institutions of bourgeois life.5
 All of this—in the anti-Bolshevik climate of the 1920s—hardly helped the cause of female
 emancipation in the rest of Europe. True, women won the vote under many of the new
 constitutions, but they still remained without it elsewhere—in France, Italy and Greece, for
 instance, and only on. a very limited basis in the UK before 1930. Moreover, splits opened
 up within the women’s movement: the old suffragist focus on electoral equality was less and
 less satisfactory to younger activists with more practical concerns. “For the working
 woman, the vote … does not represent her emancipation,” argued one Greek communist.
 “Because in this matter of supreme importance, what concerns her above all is the entire
 social problem.”6
 Constitutional provisions for equal opportunities were effectively neutralized by the new
 cult of the family, and by unchanged male-dominated family-law codes. “The State
 recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without
 which the common good cannot be achieved,” ran article 41 of the 1937 Irish constitution,
 making it clear where women were supposed to be working. Conservatives, male
dominated unions and ex-servicemen’s organizations blocked many efforts to improve
 women’s employment rights, and often succeeded in forcing them to quit wartime jobs for
 men, while professional women were often obliged to leave work upon getting married, as
 was the case for instance inside the British civil service.7
 In contrast to the selfish hedonism of the single working woman, the wife and mother (for
 the two were generally equated) encapsulated the “heroic form of Everyday life.” Or as a
 Fascist propagandist put it: “Maternity is the patriotism of women.” Even Stalin came
 round to a similar view—alarmed by soaring divorce and abortion rates in Russia as
 peasant women flocked to the cities—and in the mid-1930s the libertarian laws of the early
 Bolsheviks were replaced by a new Soviet commitment to the traditional family.8
 This inter-war European ideology of motherhood had deep roots. A long-term fall in
 national reproduction rates had begun towards the end of the nineteenth century, just as
 the competition between empires and nations was heating up. The growing importance of
 conscript armies made the size and health of a country’s population an issue of military and
 national security, especially as Europe’s states seemed locked in a Darwinian struggle for
 mastery. The French worried that Germany’s faster population growth meant their own
 eventual extinction as a great power. The Germans were not so worried about the French
 but were terrified of the “teeming Slavic hordes” to the east. Hungarian nationalists
 believed they faced a “battle without hope,” in the struggle against “folk-death” at the
 hands of Slavs, Germans and Romanians. The British, especially after the Boer War,
 wondered how a “declining race” could govern a gigantic empire. As Giuseppe Sergi, a
 leading Italian eugenicist, informed the Italian Society for the Progress of Science in 1916,
 Europe generally—still in thrall to the idea of empire—was gripped by the fear that its
 “superior races” were in decline.9
 The First World War, of course, made the whole outlook much worse, leading national
 leaders to peddle the view that “pregnancy is the woman’s active service.” In their effort to
 encourage births, the French authorities circulated wartime postcards which exhorted
 soldiers on leave to “work for repopulation” and asked young women to “work for France.”
 British pro-natalists published scary accounts of what awaited their countrymen in books
like The Menace of the Empty Cradle, or the 1916 Cradles or Coffins? Our Greatest National
 Need. In Germany, the Reichstag passed laws outlawing contraception and restricting
 abortion. “The general welfare of the state has to have precedence over women’s feelings,”
 insisted the preamble to the anti-abortion bill.10
 Nor did the fears of population decline vanish after the war ended. On the contrary,
 rising divorce rates and a series of gloomy demographic predictions pushed the issue into
 the headlines. “Fewer British babies. Sudden birth slump. Population may become stationary
 in Britain if decline lasts,” warned the Daily Mail, after one statistician warned that the
 population of England and Wales would drop to 31 million by 1975 and to a mere 17.7
 million by the century’s end. France’s leading demographer estimated that his country’s
 population would shrink to 29 million by 1980. Weimar Germany was transfixed by a 1927
 pamphlet entitled Geburtenrückgang (written by Richard Korherr, who would later become
 head of the SS Statistical Service and as such responsible for estimating the death toll of
 European Jewry for Himmler during the war), while Volk ohne Jugend (People without
 Youth) was quickly sold out on publication in 1932 and went into three editions. And global
 anxieties overlapped with national ones. “The present fall in the European birth rate,”
 warned an Italian commentator on social policy, “is an evil against which it is necessary to
 react in the name of Western civilization, the supremacy of which might be threatened by
 the overflowing masses of the coloured races.”11
 “Go back home and tell the women I need births, many births,” Mussolini instructed the
 heads of Fascist women’s organizations. But the Duce and Hitler were not the only ones, or
 even the first, to aim in this direction. Many of their propaganda ideas were modelled on
 the efforts of the French, who issued a medal “for the French family” to productive mothers
 —bronze for five children, gold for ten—who did their patriotic duty in the aftermath of the
 Great War’s bloodletting. Lobby groups like Belgium’s League of Large Families pressed for
 tax breaks and enjoyed substantial memberships. Employers promoted family allowances in
 order to help workers have more children; such measures also made the recipients more
 loyal to their firm and less likely to strike. In the 1920s, Mother’s Day—an invention of
 florists and stationers—showed in another way how capitalism was able to take advantage
 of the obsession with motherhood.12
 Maternalism was drilled into young women from the time they entered school. “Infant
 management” and “domestic science” or “housecraft” were provided in English schools to
 teach “the craft, art and profession of a good mother.” French schoolgirls were trained in
 “puericulture,” learning how to feed and bathe babies and change their nappies. Later,
 young mothers were exposed to propaganda health campaigns like National Baby Week,
 whose Infant Welfare Conference in London in 1923 displayed items for the health
conscious mother, or to the expertise offered in Sir Frederick Truby King’s Mothercraft
 Training Centres. Their German equivalents read magazines like Weimar’s Die Deutsche
 Hausfrau (The German Housewife), published by a popular middle-class housewives’
 organization, or visited one of the many travelling health exhibitions organized by the
 Dresden Hygiene Museum in order to ensure the “national fitness and the physical and
 mental health of future generations.” No fewer than seven million people visited the Ge-So
Lei (Gesundheit, soziale Fürsorge und Leibesübungen/Health, social welfare and exercise)
 exhibition, with its prominent publicity for the League of Child-Rich Families. For many of
these women, the collapse of Weimar marked the culmination of a move “away from
 liberalism, towards obligations; away from the career woman, towards the housewife and
 mother.”13
 And at the same time as women were being urged to turn into producers of babies, the state
 was making it harder for them to have abortions. “Abortion places a heavy burden on the
 state,” wrote one Soviet doctor, “because it reduces women’s contribution to production.” In
 1936 abortion was criminalized in the Soviet Union just as it had been previously in much
 of the rest of Europe. Far from communism succeeding in spreading its scandalously
 libertarian ideas through the continent, it had in its turn succumbed to the pro-natalist
 reassertion of traditional family and gender roles.14
 Catholic countries had always been sharply opposed to abortion, but their inter-war
 policies became even more repressive thanks to the intervention of the Vatican, after Pope
 Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical on the sanctity of marriage. Italy introduced heavy penalties for
 illegal abortion and doctors were obliged to report cases to the authorities. At one stage, the
 Fascist government even toyed with the idea of registering all pregnancies; its Laws on
 Public Safety did turn “impeding the fecundity of the Italian people” into a crime of state,
 while the 1930 penal code included a chapter headed “crimes against the integrity and
 health of the race.” France outlawed abortion in 1920, noting that “in the aftermath of the
 war, when almost one and a half million Frenchmen sacrificed their lives so that France
 could have the right to live in independence and honour, it cannot be tolerated that other
 French have the right to make a livelihood from the spread of abortion.” But the trend
 extended beyond the Catholic world: Britain’s 1929 Infant (Life Preservation) Act turned
 abortion into a statutory offence punishable by life imprisonment.15
 Across Europe, however, the wishes of the state and of women remained far apart.
 Twentieth-century abortion legislation remained as difficult to police as its Napoleonic
 equivalent. Prosecutions were few, and failed to have much impact upon a practice which
 remained widespread among women of all classes. Experts in the 1930s guessed that there
 were as many as half a million abortions a year in France, 150,000 in Belgium. In Weimar
 Germany, where there were more prosecutions under anti-abortion laws than in the first
 years of the Third Reich, anywhere up to 800,000 abortions took place each year. Abortion,
 in other words, was a regular method of birth control. Laws against it did not have any
 appreciable impact on birth rates; they simply made the practice more dangerous and
 furtive for millions of women. Indeed, women may have had greater recourse to abortions
 than they would have done otherwise because of the state’s simultaneous attack on other
 forms of birth control. France had banned the advertising and sale of contraceptives in
 1920, followed by Belgium in 1923 and Italy in 1926. In Franco’s Spain, birth control was
 rejected by the medical profession on religious grounds. “All restrictions to fertility are
 dangerous for the health of the woman; all women darken their souls with the black crěpe
 of mortal sin,” warned one Spanish doctor in 1941.16
 Outside Catholic Europe the movement for birth control was more powerful, and in the
 1920s some highly effective lobby groups were able to counter the pro-natalists and argue
 in favour of contraception, either as a woman’s right or on eugenic grounds as helpful to
 the nation’s health. In Britain, Marie Stopes transfixed the public with her message that
birth control was an important element of marital harmony. Her Society for Constructive
 Birth Control and Racial Progress, alongside other groups, set up birth-control clinics,
 flooded the country with pamphlets and operated a scheme of missionary Birth Control
 Caravans.17
 The German birth control movement was even stronger and more politicized, perhaps
 because it faced much greater and more determined opposition, amid a far deeper sense of
 national crisis. For Helene Stöcker—left-wing intellectual, rationalist and leader of the
 Federation for the Protection of Mothers—the outlawing of contraception implied society
 surrendering control over nature. In her mind, birth control had a eugenic purpose, for “as
 humankind has subjected all other things to its rational insight, so must it become
 increasingly master over one of the most important matters for humanity: the creation of a
 new human. One will have to find means of preventing the incurably ill or degenerate from
 reproducing.” As such statements showed, Left and Right were not so far apart as sometimes
 appeared. Both dreamed of a eugenic Utopia and were confident of their ability to reach it.
 The Third Reich actually liberalized some Weimar abortion provisions, again on eugenic
 grounds, but closed down birth-control centres and clamped down on the advertising of
 contraceptives.18
 Yet Europe’s governments did not find it easy to lever up birth rates, or to force women out
 of work and into motherhood. Overall, the number of women in the European labour force
 barely fell, and in some countries actually rose through the inter-war period. There was no
 dramatic upward trend in birth rates, and the leading authority on inter-war population
 policies concludes that they largely failed in their purpose. German birth rates did rise
 through the 1930s, but the reasons probably had little to do with Nazi policy. The regime’s
 demographers argued that National Socialism’s “psychic revolution” had prompted Germans
 to have more children. That argument, however, was weakened by the fact that SS men,
 who were expected to lead the way in ideological and sexual fervour, set the rest of the
 population a poor example: by 1939, 61 per cent of the SS were bachelors, and its married
 men averaged only 1.1 children per family.19
 Pro-natalism failed between the wars for many reasons. Perhaps the most important was
 that governments too often made policy on the cheap. Family allowances, tax rebates and
 housing subsidies were all ways of getting families to have more children, but the desperate
 financial situation of most governments made them reluctant to set incentives at a high
 enough level to make much impact. Few resorted to the imaginative Fascist expedient of
 taxing bachelors. Most relied on cheaper but equally ineffectual methods such as police
 repression and medals for prolific mothers.
 Official propagandists harping away on the family often sent confusing signals. Mothers
 did not particularly like to see bearing children as a patriotic responsibility, nor to think
 that their sons would become cannon fodder. The state, by emphasizing the themes of
 “duty” and “responsibility,” made parenthood sound like a burden. Worse still, it
 increasingly was a burden from the financial point of view. Job prospects were uncertain,
 unemployment a constant worry. The very children desired by the state were now
 prevented by it from paying their way through work, were forced to spend longer at school,
 and had now to be properly fed and housed. As the manual-labour economy was
increasingly replaced by a new demand for a skilled and literate workforce, the economics
 of the family shifted dramatically. From being essentially a unit of production as had been
 the case in the traditional farming and working-class world, it was now turning into a unit
 of consumption.
 Perhaps it is reassuring that the inter-war state should have had such little impact on
 overall population trends, and was unable entirely to control the reproductive decisions of
 ordinary individuals. What makes people have more or fewer children remains one of the
 great mysteries—the causes of the long-term decline in European fertility are no more
 settled today than the reasons for the unexpected baby boom of the 1950s—and this is
 perhaps why population trends arouse such apocalyptic fears. Nightmarish images of an
 overcrowded globe, of a Europe—whose own population is dwindling and ageing—being
 swamped by fast-breeding immigrants from the Third World are the post-war equivalents of
 those panics of the inter-war years. On the other hand, even if the inter-war state did not
 achieve what it wanted—faster-growing national populations—it did intervene in larger
 and larger areas of people’s personal lives. In ways that combined encouragement and
 coercion, the state’s desire for an improved biological stock led to a range of new family
 policies which would endure long after the obsession with population decline had vanished.
 THE STATE AS PATERFAMILIAS
 Locked away in a Fascist jail, the Italian communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci noted to
 himself the “educative and formative role of the state. Its aim is always that of creating new
 and higher types of civilization … of evolving even physically new types of humanity.”20
 The social ambitions of the inter-war state bore him out. Parents were no longer left to
 bring up their children themselves; the fear of national decline led to the emergence of a
 vast array of official welfare services alongside older private religious or charitable bodies;
 with the interventionist public sector came the rise of the professional social worker, the
 housing manager, the school health visitor and the educational psychologist. The state was
 meddling in the most intimate matters of private life, offering—it is true—a range of new
 benefits, but demanding in return adherence to an increasingly explicit model of sexual
 behaviour.
 During, or immediately after, the war, national authorities set up clinics to treat venereal
 disease and tuberculosis and regulated so far as they could the consumption of that “racial
 poison,” alcohol. Britain passed laws to bring down infant and maternal mortality, and set
 up the Ministry of Health in 1919. Its priorities on behalf of child-rearing worried some
 extreme eugenicists like Sir Robert Hutchinson, President of the Royal College of Physicians,
 who wondered “whether the … careful saving of infant lives today is really, biologically
 speaking, as wholesome as the mass production and lavish scrapping of the last century.”
 But this was very much a minority view: the birth process was increasingly medicalized and
 professionalized (not always to mothers’ benefit), and the proportion of childbirths which
 took place in hospital rose from 15 per cent in 1927 to 25 per cent ten years later, and 54
 per cent by 1946. Outside the UK, the state’s role was expanding faster and more decisively.
 In France, the wartime military health service was turned into a new Ministry of Health in
 1920. The Italian National Agency for Maternity and Infancy (set up in 1925) publicized
 modern methods of infant hygiene and promoted the medicalization of childbirth in a
country where 93 per cent of all births still took place at home; running centres for mothers
 and children in light, new, modernist buildings, seaside sanatoriums for working women,
 summer camps and medical centres, it was only dissolved in 1975.21
 The Left—operating usually at the municipal rather than the national level, and strongly
 influenced by the sweep of Bolshevik ideas in the Soviet Union—developed some of the
 most comprehensive welfare schemes of the 1920s. Social Democratic town fathers in
 Germany set up “family care” offices which aimed to “grasp the whole family” in their
 embrace to save it from the disintegrative force of capitalism. In “Red Vienna”—run
 between 1919 and 1934 by the most ambitious socialist city council in Europe—Marxist
 councillors offered a “social contract” with parents, providing special assistance such as
 baby clothing for needy couples in return for their commitment to responsible parenting.
 Where this was lacking, social workers were on hand to remove children to the municipal
 Child Observation Centres. All this was part of a “Marriage and Population Policy” designed
 to guarantee the “optimal conditions of upbringing” in the family. The Left as much as the
 Right believed—in the words of the 1937 Irish constitution—that the “family was the
 natural, primary and fundamental unit of society,” and it was more inclined than old
fashioned conservatives to use public powers to back this up. In turn, its modernizing
 activism and its ambition to create a “new human being” provided a model for the
 interventionist movements of the fascist Right of the 1930s.
 Family health was closely connected with living conditions in the built environment.
 Homes, buildings and the city itself became laboratories for new designs in improved and
 healthier forms of life. Old nineteenth-century slum dwellings were demolished to make
 way for family flats on planned estates. Social workers and housing estate managers
 checked on standards of hygiene and cooking methods. On Red Vienna’s great new
 municipal estates—some 60,000 new family flats built in fifteen years—communal
 washrooms and bathrooms were provided: “Instead of densely built house-blocks with
 narrow courts, only those were erected with large, free inner spaces into which light and air
 could stream. Each dwelling obtains an ante-room and its own WC inside the dwelling, as
 well as gas and electric light … Basement dwellings were no longer permitted.” Throughout
 inter-war Europe cities were rationalized with the aid of sweeping town planning laws,
 while parks were laid out, and lidos and playgrounds gave scope for the new obsession with
 sunlight and physical fitness. Praising the achievements of the Berlin city authorities in the
 1920s, Oberbürgermeister Gustav Boess pointed to “the new people’s parks, athletic fields
 and playgrounds, the free baths.”22
 The planning of modern life extended from the city to the interior of the home,
 systematizing movement in the private as well as the public sphere. Under the influence of
 the international style, left-wing designers modernized family life by treating household
 tasks as functions, and the family unit as an element of the Machine Age. “The layout is
 designed on the basis of studies of kitchen procedure, actions, movements etc.,” wrote a
 Czech architect of his new “production line” kitchen. “Individual parts of the equipment are
 placed alongside each other as they come into use. The basic conveyor belt is thus a
 continuous circle, avoiding criss-crossing and to-and-froing.” With its built-in cupboards and
 long working surfaces, this kitchen must have seemed highly futuristic to most housewives
 in the 1920s, a vision of a world in which cooking and indeed daily life were planned and
organized along industrial lines. In fact, the mechanization of home life would only really
 take root in the 1960s with the disappearance of cheap domestic labour; between the wars,
 middle-class homes in much of Europe still had maid’s quarters to house the dishwasher.23
 The Brave New World of the 1920s combined rationalism with moral high-mindedness.
 Laws controlled overcrowding in order to ensure “social hygiene” by eliminating the
 dangers posed by slum life to morality and health. Members of the Society of Women
 Housing Estate Managers visited families on properties owned by the Metropolitan Housing
 Corporation of London and reported that “the result has been a steady increase in the
 standards of cleanliness and in the general social health of the majority of their tenants.”
 The Corporation had set up a “model flat” which it invited residents to visit, forming an
 “ideal towards which many of the tenants are encouraged to work.” The way in which
 public housing shaped norms of family behaviour was even clearer in Holland, where
 special blocks were developed for the segregation of “asocial families.” According to the
 authorities:
 The selected families are placed in these housing compounds on a temporary
 basis for the purpose of effecting a rehabilitation and making them into clean,
 dependable and peaceable families. A great deal of attention is given to
 educating the families in the proper use of their facilities, and in showing them
 the error of their ways … When a family has demonstrated that it has become a
 normal family, it is moved into one of the regular municipal housing estates … If
 it is finally demonstrated that the family is incurable, it is evicted.24
 “Incurable” families: here was the language of medical science being applied to social
 norms and morality in a context far removed from that of Nazi Germany. In fact, the Third
 Reich’s obsessions fitted into the broader European debate about social policy. The inter-war
 state justified its interventions in private life by appealing to notions of professionalism, of
 scientific expertise and apolitical competence. Middle-class professionals, civil servants and
 public administrators presented themselves as a modern instrument of social management,
 doctors working on the body of society and concerned with its health.
 American relief officials, for instance, working in Europe after 1918, saw themselves
 explicitly above the political fray as they distributed food relief to the starving peasants of
 Poland and the Ukraine, set up children’s clinics and dispensed free milk in Vienna, or
 supervised the resettlement of millions of refugees in Greece. The Rockefeller Foundation
 sponsored campaigns to eradicate tuberculosis by “applying the art of advertising to the
 facts of science.” But Europeans, too, liked to see social policy as a non-political matter, a
 question of “social hygiene.” In Britain, for instance, members of the British Social Hygiene
 Council called for the “institutionalization” of the mentally ill, health and sex education in
 schools, better housing and sanitation and improvements in child nutrition. In France, the
 Health Ministry was advised by a Conseil Supérieur d’Hygiène Sociale. Society was seen as
 an object for social engineering, in which enlightened and impartial policy was made in a
 spirit of rational detachment from political passions.25
 Nowhere were the ambiguities of this kind of approach more evident than among the
 eugenicists—those people, in other words, on both Left and Right who believed that it was
indeed possible to produce “better” human beings through the right kind of social policies.
 Increasingly accepted by social scientists and administrators before the First World War, the
 eugenics movement was boosted by the mass killing of the war itself. In his address of
 welcome to the second International Eugenics Congress in 1921, Henry Fairfield Osborn of
 the American Museum of Natural History declared: “I doubt that there has ever been a
 moment in the world’s history when an international conference on race character and
 betterment has been more important than the present. Europe, in patriotic self-sacrifice on
 both sides of the World War, has lost much of the heritage of centuries of civilization which
 can never be regained. In certain parts of Europe, the worst elements of society have
 gained the ascendancy and threaten the destruction of the best.”26
 Prompted by such fears, societies dedicated to the promotion of eugenics, or to its German
 cousin “racial hygiene,” spread from western Europe and Scandinavia to Spain and the
 Soviet Union. Enthusiasts promoted national fitness in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and
 established ties with patriotic sports associations. The Russian Eugenics Office, founded in
 1921, called for “comparative work on eugenics by scientific and social workers in all
 specialties” and forged links with the Eugenic Record Office in the USA, the German Society
 for Race and Social Biology and the British Eugenics Education Society. Thus the movement
 was not simply the sinister proto-Nazi precursor it looks like today; it was, rather, a broad
 church with confidence in its own scientific standing. Believers included social democrats
 and Liberal reformers like Keynes and Beveridge in Britain, as well as conservatives and
 right-wing authoritarians. Some were anti-Semites, but some leading German “racial
 hygienists” were Jews. Some stressed “negative” measures such as sterilization; others
 “positive” policies to improve fitness, nutrition and public health, warding off racial decline
 through fresh air, regular exercise and sunbathing. What they shared was confidence in the
 power of the state and public authorities to shape society for the better.
 Of course, the nature of the coming “new man” and the broader social setting were
 defined rather differently by eugenicists across the political spectrum. Social Democrats
 focused on the condition of the urban working class, and the city more generally. For many
 conservatives, on the other hand, the vision of a mechanized industrial world where human
 beings were reduced to functional components in a labour process was the problem not the
 answer to the crisis of modern society. Le Corbusier is dreams of “the contemporary city
 with three million inhabitants”—“la Ville radieuse” (1935)—left them cold. They identified
 social health not with the city but with the countryside, not with industry and the machine
 but with the soil and manual labour. For many eugenicists, cities had paradoxical effects
 upon human fertility: they made the middle classes sterile while at the same time inducing
 the lower classes to breed with appalling speed. In fact, prompted by eugenic concerns, a
 deep-rooted ambivalence could be encountered across Europe about the social and
 biological consequences of urbanization.
 Before 1914 Europe’s surplus population had been siphoned off across the Atlantic, or
 settled in far-flung colonies. But after 1918, America closed its doors and transatlantic
 emigration on the scale of the past became impossible. The imperial powers tried to
 encourage people to become farmers in Tanganyika, Libya or the East Indies, but few had
 found this idea attractive in the past, and fewer still were tempted in the 1920s. Peasants
 looking for work, or refugees from persecution, flocked into the cities, and the number of
Europe’s conurbations with more than one million inhabitants doubled between the wars.
 This flight to the cities was on a limited scale compared with what would take place after
 1950, yet in the depressed and anxious conditions of the 1920s and 1930s it provoked deep
 unease.
 Alarmed at the growth of the “Great Cities,” the Secretary of the German Society for
 Housing Reform saw them threatening “the roots of our whole existence … biologically
 through the enormous decline in birth-rates … politically through the negation of the bases
 of a healthy democracy … militarily through the obvious and particularly great
 vulnerability of big cities in wartime, and morally through the enormous obstacles that the
 contemporary big city places in the way of the necessary moral regeneration of our nation.”
 Sir Arthur Keith—an eminent British anthropologist and President of the British Association
 for the Advancement of Science—contrasted the life led by modern city-dwellers with that of
 their “tribal ancestors” and became uneasy about “the effects of modern civilization on the
 minds and bodies of those who are subjected to it for many generations.” The biologist
 Konrad Lorenz, whose writings after 1938 betrayed a sympathy for National Socialism,
 argued similarly that the “domestication” of human beings by modern life was leading to
 racial deterioration and was thus opposed to true evolution. Whereas ancient village life
 was supposed to have bred a sense of community and encouraged child-rearing, the modern
 city offered pleasures and temptations which threatened family solidarity and fed individual
 selfishness and alienation: its bitter fruits were youthful “asocials” and “psychopaths” as
 well as sexual hedonism shaped by the easy availability of casual partners and birth control.
 Cinema—that post-war apparition—was seen as a poisonous influence, condemned by
 Church leaders, criticized by conservative politicians and studied by social scientists.27
 Providing public housing with allotments and private gardens, or shifting the focus of
 building from city centres to suburban homesteads and new pseudo-villages was one way of
 trying to cope. In Poland, Scandinavia and Germany, the authorities built as though for
 urban farmers. In the UK, private builders responded to similar desires among their buyers
 by offering mock-Tudor and other “pre-urban” styles.28 But as the political outlook in
 Europe darkened, this public love affair with an idealized countryside intensified. Across the
 continent, the modernist idiom of the 1920s—internationalist, mechanized—gave way in
 the arts to a more nationalist concern with the organic and with a life close to nature.
 Rationalism was replaced by an emphasis on the instinctual, individualism by the tribal and
 communal life, the brain by the body. Weimar’s New Realism was succeeded by Hitler’s
 Aryan landscapes of fields and farmers, just as in France the cosmopolitan art scene of Paris
 was challenged by the avowedly Gallic paysages of Dunoyer de Segonzac and Ozenfant.
 Fascist Italy had started out worshipping the machine, Futurism and the destruction of the
 past; by the 1930s it had embraced classicism, history and the land.
 Yet once again, in practice, the state found it difficult imposing its wishes upon its
 recalcitrant population. Mussolini tried to prevent country-dwellers settling in towns
 without work, deporting new unemployed arrivals back to the provinces. This did not work
 very well. Others tried to make the rural life more attractive by giving loans to new farmers
 and building new housing estates in country areas. In Eire, the government subsidized
 remote Gaelic-speaking communities. In Britain—where urbanization had begun earlier
 than almost anywhere else—access to the countryside was made easier for city-dwellers. It
was natural that a prominent eugenicist like Lord Horder, royal physician and President of
 the Eugenics Society, should have combined an interest in mental health and family
 planning with a concern for physical fitness, the Boy Scouts and the National Park
 movement.
 But in fact nothing stemmed the movement citywards. Cities remained magnets of
 employment and cultural freedom. Moreover, the state itself had only a limited interest in
 following up its own rhetoric: in an era when national power depended upon industrial
 progress, the country life could never present a convincing alternative to the city. “It is
 necessary to correct many legends concerning urbanization and populous cities,” wrote an
 Italian journalist in 1925. “The idyllic country, the creator of vigorous loins and the nursery
 of the long-lived, is a work of poets; in any case, it cannot be in accord with the
 development of industry.” For nation-states determined to fight for their place in the world,
 cities might look dangerous to national health and power, but they were indispensable
 nonetheless.29
 QUANTITY AND QUALITY
 Bodies were on display between the wars as never before, parading in what a previous
 generation would have regarded as underwear or scandalous near-nudity. Footballers’
 shorts crept up to around the knee, while the members of the human pyramids
 photographed by Rodchenko in Russia even went without vests. Open-air public swimming
 pools were available for recreation and pleasure; new stadia were built—in Wembley,
 Vienna, Berlin—for grander sporting and political events. Massed together in ranks and
 rows, these bodies projected collective unity and political might. In 1931, 100,000 socialists
 marched round Vienna’s Ring before watching a show in the new stadium in the Prater in
 which 4,000 performers enacted the overthrow of capitalism. This was a vast spectacle—
 with banner parades and mass callisthenics, choruses, chants and oath ceremonies. It
 represented a deliberate projection of the military might of the workers’ movement,
 inspired in many ways by the Bolshevik Proletkult festivals of the early 1920s. In turn, it
 looks to us very like the Nuremberg Party rallies of the Nazi Party. Even placid Britain—in
 a much less charged political atmosphere—offered mass pageants like the 1924 Empire
 Festival or the Albert Hall spectaculars laid on by the Women’s League of Health and
 Beauty. In most countries, keeping fit was not so much the matter of consumer choice it
 would become after 1950 as a national or class duty: “The body culture of the Worker is the
 Core of Socialist Construction,” ran the slogan on a Soviet poster. Right-wing movements
 from the conservative Boy Scouts to the Romanian fascists in the Iron Guard took a similar
 view. The more politics was seen in terms of military struggle and national survival, the
 more important became the physical fitness of the collectivity.
 But the state had not merely to promote the healthy body; it had also, in one way or
 another, to ensure it was not contaminated by the unhealthy. It had, in terms of eugenicist
 thought, to concern itself with the quality as well as the quantity of the nation’s human
 stock.
 Negative eugenics—obsessed by the idea of social degeneration—was especially
preoccupied by the threat posed by the mentally ill. Ever since Darwin’s cousin, Francis
 Galton, called for “stern compulsion” to “check the birth rate of the unfit,” eugenicists had
 urged state action to stop the breeding of racial inferiors. In Britain, the pre-1914 Liberal
 government studied the problem of the “feeble-minded”—a catch-all category which
 included the deaf and dumb, those “unable to earn a living” or “incapable of managing
 themselves or their affairs with ordinary prudence.” To Prime Minister Asquith, the young
 Winston Churchill privately described the high birth rate of the “mentally deficient”
 alongside the “restriction of the progeny among all the thrifty, energetic and superior
 stocks” as “a very terrible danger to the race.” In 1913 a law was passed providing for the
 detention of “mental defectives” in special institutions in order to prevent them having
 children.30
 Poor young women who in one way or another threatened prevailing social norms
 thereby found themselves at risk of being seized on the flimsiest of pretexts—at the behest
 of father, husband, doctor or employer—and held for years among those with genuine
 mental problems. It was, for example, only after his father’s death that the Bristol working
class boy called Archie Leach—better known to the world as Cary Grant—found out that the
 mother he thought had abandoned him and his father was actually living in an institution
 where his father had placed her in order to be able to live with his mistress.
 Yet holding people in asylums—the British solution—was an expensive means of
 preventing them having children. Sterilization—a cheaper alternative, but one which
 involved actual physical violence to the body—had been widely discussed in late
nineteenth-century Germany and Scandinavia and actually introduced into several
 American states. The USA was at the forefront of negative eugenics around this time, and
 by 1921 2,233 people had been legally sterilized there, mostly in California. But several
 doctors in Weimar Germany were also carrying out illegal voluntary sterilizations without
 sanction.31
 Sterilization was a precise answer to the issue which so worried eugenicists of differential
 birth rates between “superior” and “inferior” population groups. It targeted the fast
breeding inferiors—however defined—and thus supplemented the positive welfare measures
 which the state could take to encourage more “valuable” births. The financial crisis of 1929
 made sterilization’s relative cheapness seem increasingly attractive, and laws providing for
 voluntary sterilization were passed between 1928 and 1936 in Switzerland, Denmark,
 Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Estonia. Even in liberal Britain the debate was
 reopened by the 1929 Wood Report on Mental Deficiency, which found that there had been
 an alarming growth in mental deficiency over the previous two decades, and warned that
 there was a “social problem group”—whose size it estimated at no less than four million,
 roughly 10 per cent of the total population—which posed an acute threat to national health.
 Eugenicists proposed sterilization as the answer, after the Eugenics Society’s Social Problem
 Group Investigation Committee found that poor living conditions were caused by mental
 deficiency. As in our own times, the poor—labelled as “the socially inadequate”—were
 being blamed for their own poverty: slum-dwellers were the “chief architects of slumdom.”32
 British eugenicists—reflecting the characteristic national obsession with class—ran into a
 wall of opposition. Church, medical and labour leaders helped block proposed sterilization
 legislation, and there were legal complications as well. All this reflected the rather mild
sense of national crisis which existed there compared with on the Continent. But while
 eugenics was losing ground in Britain, it was gaining it in Germany, where the desire for
 national reassertion was as strong as anywhere. The National Socialist seizure of power
 swiftly ushered in compulsory sterilization laws which targeted first the mentally ill, then
 “dangerous habitual criminals,” and eventually juvenile offenders as well. By 1937 over
 200,000 people had been sterilized, compared with slightly over 3,000 in the USA, among
 them gypsies, the so-called Rhineland Bastards (children of liaisons between German
 women and black French soldiers), the “morally feeble-minded,” “disorderly wanderers,” the
 “workshy” and “asocials.”
 To this point, Hitler’s Germany realized on a massive scale a policy of coercive social
 engineering which other governments—in Sweden and elsewhere—followed to a more
 limited extent. But Nazi ambitions ranged further still. In 1939 the regime moved from
 sterilization to mass murder. Under Hitler’s special authorization, between 70,000 and
 93,000 inmates of asylums and clinics were gassed before the euthanasia campaign was run
 down after public opposition from Church leaders. After 1941, the killing of mental patients
 continued on a smaller scale, mostly by lethal injection, while the euthanasia experts found
 new employment running the death camps in Poland and operating mobile gassing units.
 These measures formed part of a new approach to social policy which promoted the
 health of the “national community” at the same time as suppressing its internal biological
 enemies. On the one hand, it helped newlyweds with marriage loans (granted, naturally, on
 condition that the woman gave up work, and that both partners were racially sound) and
 offered child benefits, free vacations and day-care facilities. On the other, it rounded up
 beggars and assigned them to camps or compulsory labour schemes. “The construction of a
 lunatic asylum costs 6 million RM. How many houses at 15,000 RM each could have been
 built for that amount?” a maths school book asked children.33 What was striking was not
 merely the extremism of the regime’s philosophy, but the lengths to which the most modern
 state apparatus in Europe would now go to implement it.
 Even before 1933, the German state displayed an ability to organize repressive social
 policies with unusual efficiency. Special police units targeted the gypsies (helped by the
 1926 Bavarian Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Workshy), while
 unemployed men were labelled as “workshy antisocials” and dragooned into militarized
 “comrade groups” to keep them off the streets. But after 1933, such actions were centralized
 and intensified, backed by the findings of racial scientists such as Dr. Ernst Rüdin, whose
 “thirty years of research in psychiatric genealogy” provided the scientific justification for
 the new sterilization laws. The state financed the country’s leading Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
 for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics, to which a young wartime researcher on their
 staff called Josef Mengele would send eyes and internal human organs back from his
 laboratory in Auschwitz.
 Demographers and statisticians helped organize enormous surveys of criminal and
 medical records, while doctors, medical researchers and psychologists sat on the Hereditary
 Health Courts which gave verdicts on cases of sterilization. Criminal biologists conducted
 investigations into “criminal types,” traced their genealogies and built up data banks. Far
 from being regarded as unscientific and barbaric, such research was modern enough to
 interest leading policemen and lawmakers of other countries. Only the outbreak of war in
1939 prevented Sir Norman Kendal, head of Britain’s Scotland Yard, from taking up a
 German invitation to tour the Dachau concentration camp in order to study contemporary
 policing methods, and to hear Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, lecturing on new
 techniques of crime control.
 The racial nature of the Nazi welfare state targeted above all the country’s Jews. They
 were gradually but systematically excluded from the “national community”—first dismissed
 from public employment, then subjected to economic boycott and deprived of the protection
 of the law. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws for the first time offered a systematic definition of
 being Jewish and turned Jews into subjects, not citizens: the criminalization of interracial
 sexual relations and the prohibition of mixed marriages followed swiftly. The systematic
 Aryanization of Jewish properties—notably in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938—could
 also be seen as part of this coercive and exclusionary racial welfare programme: more
 apartments were obtained by Nazi Aryanization policies in the Austrian capital in three
 years than had been built by the Social Democrats in the 1920s.
 The exclusion, persecution and eventual extermination of the Jews was the culmination of
 a social philosophy which based itself upon the protection of the Volksgemeinschaft—a
 racially defined national community. “[Weimar governments] failed in the case of
 community aliens,” wrote a Munich law professor in 1944. “They did not make knowledge
 of eugenics and criminal biology the basis of sound welfare and criminal policies.
 Liberalistic thinking saw only the ‘rights’ of the individual, and was more concerned with
 the protection of rights vis-à-vis the state than with the well-being of the community. In
 National Socialism, the individual does not count so far as society is concerned.”34
 The emergence of the German racial welfare state—which was in so many ways the
 apotheosis of very widespread trends in European social thought—inevitably provoked an
 intense debate elsewhere. The exclusion of entire groups from the benefits enjoyed by the
 “national community,” the definition of that community in terms of racial biology, the
 recourse to police repression and medical violence highlighted all the ambiguities present in
 European thinking about race.
 In an age of empire and social Darwinism, notions of racial hierarchy were ubiquitous,
 and few Europeans on Left or Right did not believe in ideas of racial superiority in one form
 or another, or accept their relevance to colonial policy. So-called “scientific racism” was
 taken seriously and influenced public attitudes. Sir Harry Johnston, for instance, a British
 colonial commentator, had defended the new science of anthropology to the public in 1908
 on the grounds that it would help the rulers of empire decide whether races should be
 preserved, allowed to interbreed, or forced to die out. German anthropologists who shaped
 SS racial policy in eastern Europe during the Second World War had begun their careers
 with scholarly articles on “race mixing” in pre-1914 colonial Africa and Asia, where their
 concerns were shared by British and French colleagues.35
 On the other hand, the application—and in such a radical form—of these ideas inside
 Europe was another matter entirely. In general, the concept of race had an exceptionally
 amorphous and indeterminate meaning, and varied widely from one country to another.
 Hitler’s policies made it harder to avoid confronting and working out these ambiguities,
 especially as they coincided with new discoveries in genetics, serology and the causation of
mental illness which cast doubt on earlier assumptions about the scientific foundations of
 racial thought.
 In few countries was biological racism as central to the definition of the nation as it
 became in inter-war Germany. References to la stirpe (race) in Italy, or to “the health of the
 race” in Britain were usually vague ways of talking about historical communities, with little
 impact on policy. Italian eugenicists were, after all, in favour of racial mixing, which they
 believed led to “hybrid vigour,” while the British were more concerned about differential
 birth rates between classes. In France, the nation was defined mainly in terms of language
 and culture, in the Balkans in terms of language and religion. Racial prejudice and anti
Semitism were omnipresent but not necessarily decisive in shaping policy. To be sure, the
 Third Reich spawned imitators, and hardline racialist movements flourished in Poland and
 Hungary. In General Metaxas’s Greece, Jews were not allowed to enter the regime’s youth
 movement. In Fascist Italy, the 1938 racial laws led to hundreds of dismissals from the
 universities and the civil service. Yet none of this—not even in Italy—could be compared in
 extent or intensity with what was happening in Nazi Germany.
 In France, bitterly polarized as few other countries were between Left and Right, the
 1930s saw a strengthening of both racism and anti-racism. In the 1920s high levels of
 immigration—from Poland, Algeria and elsewhere—had been welcomed as one way of
 boosting the birth rate; but in the 1930s anti-immigrant sentiment grew and large crowds—
 among them the young François Mitterrand—demanded the deportation of the new
 arrivals. As in the USA and the UK earlier, racial issues were closely tied to calls for
 immigration controls against “aliens.” At the same time, tracts like René Martial’s 1934 La
 Race française were countered by anti-racist journals like Races et racisme. It is, in fact, from
 this time that the concept of “racism” itself dates. Ludwig Hirszfeld, who together with his
 wife Hanna had pioneered research into blood types after the First World War, wrote to
 dissociate himself “from those who attach the blood groups to the mystique of race.”36
 In Britain, the attack on scientific racism was still stronger, though it is not clear whether
 this was due to better public understanding of the scientific issues, to lower levels of inter
war immigration, a relatively weak and nebulous tradition of thinking about nationalism,
 or simply greater outright antipathy to trends in Nazi Germany. But leading researchers
 into the causes of mental illness demolished the myth of the “social problem group,” and
 with it the mainstay of the hardline eugenicist case in Britain. At the same time, a group of
 left-wing scientists and intellectuals campaigned against scientific racism.37
 Typical of the works produced in this spirit in the English-speaking world were Jacques
 Barzun’s Race: A Study in Modern Superstition and Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous
 Myth: The Fallacy of Race. But the sharpest attack of all came in a book called We Europeans:
 A Survey of “Racial” Problems, which was a best-seller in 1936. Written by the biologist
 Julian Huxley with the elderly anthropologist A. C. Haddon, We Europeans was a ferocious
 assault on what its authors described as the “pseudo-science of ‘racial biology.’ ” Huxley
 himself was a confirmed believer in eugenics, who felt Nazi racism had done the movement
 much harm. He underlined the vagueness of the term “race” and cast doubt on the existence
 of such a thing as “racial group sentiment” (a concept beloved not only by the Nazis but by
 British racial anthropologists such as Sir Arthur Keith). Huxley observed sarcastically:
 Our German neighbours have ascribed to themselves a teutonic type that is fair,
long-headed, tall and virile. Let us make a composite picture of a typical Teuton
 from the most prominent exponents of this view. Let him be as blond as Hitler,
 as dolichocephalic as Rosenberg, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Goering and
 as manly as Streicher. How much would this resemble the German ideal?38
 In common with other British researchers of the time, Huxley and Haddon insisted that there
 were no “pure races” in the biological sense in Europe. Environment, they argued, was
 more important than heredity in shaping the sense of communal identity, and they
 recommended using the term “ethnic group” rather than “race,” as the former lacked the
 latter’s misleading biological associations. But their book ended with a sombre warning:
 The violent racialism to be found in Europe today is a symptom of Europe’s
 exaggerated nationalism: it is an attempt to justify nationalism on a non
nationalist basis, to find a firm basis in objective science for ideas and policies
 which are generated internally by a particular economic and political system,
 and have real relevance only in reference to that system. The cure for the racial
 myth, with its accompanying self-exaltation and persecution of others, which
 now besets Europe, is a re-orientation of the nationalist ideal, and in the
 practical sphere, an abandonment of claims by nations to absolute sovereign
 rights. Meanwhile, however, science and the scientific spirit can do something by
 pointing out the biological realities of the ethnic situation, and by refusing to
 lend her sanction to the absurdities and horrors perpetrated in her name.
 Racialism is a myth and a dangerous myth at that.39
 It was in the Second World War that Sir William Beveridge offered his “welfare state” as a
 contrast to the Nazi “warfare state.” But between the two world wars, welfare and warfare
 were intimately connected, and social policies to improve population numbers and health
 reflected the anxieties of nation-states keen to defend or reassert themselves in a world of
 enemies. The Second World War fostered a new international anti-racist consensus, which
 was bolstered by new discoveries in genetics, marshalled by politically committed scientists
 such as Huxley, and reinforced by the knowledge of what Nazi policies had ultimately led
 to. All of this helped discredit attitudes which had been commonplace in the inter-war era.
 In Europe, a belief in scientific racism only lingered on among some anthropologists and
 social scientists in central Europe, who continue to see “long-skulled” and “big-boned” racial
 types around them to this day. But this is a relatively peripheral group with little impact on
 social policy. In general, it is now hard for us—living in a more individualistic world—to
 appreciate how far many welfare policies of the post-war decades grew out of a very
 different set of concerns about the decline, degeneration and reinvigoration of the nation
 and the race.40

Answer the following questions based on the above text.

Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies (Mazower, 1999)

Main Questions:
What is Volksgemeinschaft and what are its characteristics?
How do you understand the statement by Magnus Hirschfeld that the First World War was the “greatest sexual catastrophe ever suffered by civilized Man”? What were the consequences of this catastrophe?
What are the consequences of the First World War for the role of women in postwar European society. Provide examples. What was the counter reaction to this ‘gender revolution’ (the change in women’s roles in European society)? Cite examples.
What is ‘Darwinian Struggle’ What is its consequence for national policies? 
What is Eugenics? Provide context and examples. 
What is the role of cities in the text?
What is ‘welfare state’? Provide concrete examples of the welfare policy mentioned in the text. Which British politician is a symbol of the ‘welfare state’? How is the ‘welfare state’ different from ‘racial welfare state’?
What differentiates Nazi approach from others? Provide examples and context.

Bonus questions (if there is time left):
What is the meaning (purpose, reason) of the Second World War from the perspective of social policy (according to the article)?
How do you understand the term “sexual Bolshevism?”