Review by Choice Review
This book both traces the development of the discipline of criminology in modern Germany and contributes to the debate over the relationship of Hitler's Third Reich to what preceded it. Wetzell sides with those who view the Nazi era as a pathological example of modernity rather than one of German particularity. Further, he joins those who have demonstrated that the Nazi regime was much less uniform than had been hitherto assumed. As 19th-century German academics moved away from an individualistic retributive theory of crime to a more deterministic one, they divided between those who emphasized the social origins of crime and those who emphasized its medical origins. The latter, under the lead of psychiatrists, became dominant by the Weimar Republic, but usually in a form qualified by the former. Many criminologists came to believe that criminal characteristics were hereditary, although there was widespread disagreement about how to constitute those characteristics. Wetzell demonstrates both the continuation of this disagreement into the Nazi era and the disagreement among criminologists over whether to endorse the Nazi policies of forced sterilization and "euthanasia" of criminals. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. T. Loader; University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
