di Michael Wedekind
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 19 (2005), p. 117
The paper focuses on the relationship between politics, administrative bureaucracies, and social sciences in planning, legitimizing, and executing National Socialist population policies in the Alpine and upper Adriatic area from 1939 to 1945. By highlighting forced emigration of German South Tyroleans and intertwined resettlement issues and ethnopolitical interventions in occupied Eastern Europe (1939-1943) as well as Nazi annexation and population policy in occupied Slovenia (1941-1945) and Northern Italy (1943-1945), the article contributes to a current debate on the role and responsibilities social sciences had in providing the Third Reich with academic knowledge and techniques of exercising social power, especially in matters of aggressive conceptions of territorial reorganization, radical ethnic and social “rebuilding” as well as German nationality policy in annexed territories.