During the First World War, delousing became routine for soldiers and civilians following the recent discovery that the louse carried typhus germs. But how did typhus come to be viewed as a "Jewish disease" and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers in the Second World War? In this powerful book, Professor Weindling draws upon wide-ranging archival research throughout East and Central Europe to the United States, to provide valuable new insight into the history of German medicine from its response to the perceived threat of typhus epidemics from its Eastern borders. He examines how German experts in tropical medicine took an increasingly racialised approach to bacteriology, regarding supposedly racially inferior peoples as carriers of the disease.So they came to view typhus as a "Jewish" disease. By the Second World War as migrants and deportees had become conditioned to expect the ordeal of delousing at border crossings, ports, railway junctions and on entry to camps, so sanitary policing became entwined with racialisation as the Germans sought to eradicate typhus by eradicating the perceived carriers. Typhus had come to assume a new and terrifying genocidal significance, as the medical authorities sealed the German frontiers against diseased undesirables from the east, and gassing became a favoured means of disease eradication.

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire. Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures, as with AIDS during the last two decades of the twentieth century. However, scholars and public intellectuals, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics. Instead of sparking hatred and blame, this study traces epidemics' socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture: that epidemic diseases have more often unified societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion.

Analyzes aspects of the German-Russian collaboration often overlooked by students of cross-national science, including the choice of 'friends' across borders, the activities of scientific entrepreneurs, the tensions between bi-lateral and international science, and the migration of scientists.. - Of the many interwar connections between Germany and Russia, one of the most unusual - and least explored - is medicine and public health. Between 1922 and 1932, with high-level political support and government funding, Soviet and German physicians and public health specialists collaborated in joint research expeditions, published joint articles, launched a bi-lingual journal, and established joint research institutions. Surprisingly, students of Soviet-German relations have all but ignored this medical collaboration; while historians of science have treated it as political history, an exercise in cultural diplomacy designed to mitigate the impact of the post-war exclusion of both nations from the international science. The contributors to this volume, who come from Germany, Russia, Britain, the United States and Canada, depart from the traditional approach to the subject. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, the authors move beyond politics to examine the impact of this collaboration on scientific activity

How vermin went from being part of everyone's life to a mark of disease, filth, and lower status. For most of our time on this planet, vermin were considered humanity's common inheritance. Fleas, lice, bedbugs, and rats were universal scourges, as pervasive as hunger or cold, at home in both palaces and hovels. But with the spread of microscopic close-ups of these creatures, the beginnings of sanitary standards, and the rising belief that cleanliness equaled class, vermin began to provide a way to scratch a different itch: the need to feel superior, and to justify the exploitation of those pronounced ethnically—and entomologically—inferior. In Getting Under Our Skin, Lisa T. Sarasohn tells the fascinating story of how vermin came to signify the individuals and classes that society impugns and ostracizes. How did these creatures go from annoyance to social stigma? And how did people thought verminous become considered almost a species of vermin themselves? Focusing on Great Britain and North America, Sarasohn explains how the label "vermin" makes dehumanization and violence possible. She describes how Cromwellians in Ireland and US cavalry on the American frontier both justified slaughter by warning "Nits grow into lice." Nazis not only labeled Jews as vermin, they used insecticides in the gas chambers to kill them during the Holocaust. Concentrating on the insects living in our bodies, clothes, and beds, Sarasohn also looks at rats and their social impact. Besides their powerful symbolic status in all cultures, rats' endurance challenges all human pretentions. From eighteenth-century London merchants anointing their carved bedsteads with roasted cat to repel bedbugs to modern-day hedge fund managers hoping neighbors won't notice exterminators in their penthouses, the studies in this book reveal that vermin continue to fuel our prejudices and threaten our status. Getting Under Our Skin will appeal to cultural historians, naturalists, and to anyone who has ever scratched—and then gazed in horror.

European Holocaust Studies (EHS) publishes key international research results on the murder of the European Jews and its wider contexts. In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").

This book traces transformations in German views of Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, leading up to the disastrous German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Casteel shows how Russia figured in the imperial visions and utopian desires of a variety of Germans, including scholars, journalists, travel writers, government and military officials, as well as nationalist activists. He illuminates the ambiguous position that Russia occupied in Germans' global imaginary as both an imperial rival and an object of German power. During the interwar years in particular, Russia, now under Soviet rule, became a site onto which Germans projected their imperial ambitions and expectations for the future, as well as their worst anxieties about modernity. Casteel shows how the Nazis drew on this cultural repertoire to construct their own devastating vision of racial imperialism.