ABSTRACT
We need to disaggregate Nazi race ideologues since they do not form one undifferentiated mass. Ultimately all the Nazis were race ideologues, and chief among them were Hitler and Himmler and the other leading figures. The leading Nazis, whether they dealt specifically with ‘racial policy’ or not, put forward an ideology which was a racialized ideology, but those who made a name for themselves specifically as race theorists did not therefore all share the same views, nor did they all contribute in equal manner to the regime’s crimes. Nor did race science, however deeply it threw its lot in with Nazism, drive the regime as much as did a kind of racial mysticism, or ‘thinking with the blood’. This chapter evaluates the relative contributions made to the Third Reich and its crimes by race scientists of different stripes, on the one hand, and theorists of racial-political conspiracies, on the other.
