ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns Nazi efforts to interweave, and exacerbate by selective and cynical manipulation, accusations that Jews embodied and maliciously spread the scourges of disease and crime. While previous chapters have focused on nineteenth-century classifying tendencies and their consequences, here, the aim is to extend the scope of investigation into the twentieth century. In so doing, the chapter develops two key themes explored in this volume: namely, the overlaps and contradictions between biological and social accounts of disease and crime, and the ways in which these explanations formed the basis of coercive state practices. Indeed, the ghetto and the concentration camp mark the radical amplification of the ‘crime scene’ considered in Chapter 3 by Robert Peckham, where the technologies of modern science were deployed to disclose the hidden causal relations between the pathological and the deviant. Exaggerated tendencies toward criminality and debilitating disease were part of essentialist Nazi constructs of Jews that were a spur to, guide, and justification for actions that culminated in genocide. Suspected of a proclivity to fatal ‘contagions,’ Jews were treated as criminals. 1 This was related to—but not necessarily synonymous with—the belief that Jews polluted and sought to undermine the so-called ‘Aryan’ race. Criminality, which was construed as inherent to Jewry, was perceived as a manifestation of disease, as well as a culturally conditioned, learned set of behaviors.
