Making Germans: Race, Empire, and Assimilation in Nazi Europe (Publications of the German Historical Institute)

Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi regime presided over one of the largest campaigns of state-sponsored assimilation in modern history. Across Europe, millions of people were classified as members of the “master race” amid the horrors of the Second World War, a huge number of whom renounced their nationality to embrace Hitler's cause. Making Germans recounts this endeavor through the prism of its model, the Re-Germanization Procedure, a special initiative of demographic engineering run by Heinrich Himmler's SS which sent select foreign subjects to undergo conversion in the heart of the Third Reich. By documenting the experiences and relationships of the ordinary civilians who participated in the program, and examining the impact of their involvement, Bradley Nichols reveals a key interplay between Nazi empire-building at home and abroad. In that vein, this study offers a fresh take on the much-debated question of whether the Holocaust was a form of colonialism. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.