ABSTRACT
The Nazi Holocaust is the worst crime in human history, in its scale and its horror. Yet the academic study of the Holocaust by criminologists is largely neglected. Sumner has sought to draw attention to this neglect (Sumner, 1990a:20-3). He makes the case, as Lopez-Rey (1970) does, that criminology has for too long neglected crimes of the state, war crimes, and genocide and focused upon ‘juvenile delinquent behaviour’. At a more general level Rock makes the point that ‘the erratic history of criminology has been marked by the organized neglect of many, if not most, of the phenomena that constitute crime’ (Rock, 1973:392). The point is that criminology needs to focus on the big crimes as well as the small. It must examine the political economy of crime; it must examine the cultural context of the censure of crime. It must seek to examine the ideology of censure. It must perceive crime in relation to history. Finally, a theory needs to be developed to note how art and culture contribute to crime. A need exists to examine further aspects of violent censure when such censure is legitimized by the state. This chapter seeks to examine how the banal censure of anti-Semitism was nourished by the Nazi state. It is noted how such a censure once nourished led directly to genocide. The chapter will examine how the political and economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s positioned Germany to an anti-modernist and anti-Semitic ideology. It will show how that ideology was reflected in the art of the Nazi period. It is my aim to demonstrate the ideological role of National Socialist art in the plan to marginalize, and ultimately to annihilate, European Jewry. The historical analysis offered will be aimed at filling a gap which exists in the criminological treatment of genocide. In general, the social sciences have neglected aesthetics, and this focus on art in the study of the Holocaust may
make a contribution to sociological studies. Because there is such a wealth of art historical academic writing to be evaluated, and because the art of the Nazi period has still not been penetrated, the perspective may be particularly fertile for the development of criminological theory.
