After at least four decades of preoccupation with the generic character of Fascism and Nazism, their relationship to capitalism or communist totalitarianism, or the structural determinants of the ‘Final Solution’, historians have once again recognised that the distinguishing characteristic of Nazi Germany was its obsession with race. This assertion does not exclude the fact that Nazism drew on pathologies and trends also common in free societies, such as Great Britain or the United States of America; or that it can be usefully compared with both Italian Fascism and that other hubristic attempt to refashion mankind, namely Bolshevik Russia's seventy-year journey along the ‘road to nowhere’. In the last decade or so, historians have dramatically increased our understanding of Nazi racialism, which was until recently regarded as being effectively coterminous with racial anti-Semitism. The new cast of victims includes the so-called ‘anti-social’, Arab or Afro-Germans ‘Rhineland bastards’), foreign forced labour, homosexuals and lesbians, the mentally and physically handicapped, Sinti and Roma (‘Gypsies’) and Soviet prisoners of war, none of whose horrible fates detracts from the singularity of the Nazi murder of six million European Jews, any more than the latter does vice versa. Understanding of the process of persecution now includes greater awareness of the culpable involvement of various sections of the professional intelligentsia, such as anthropologists, doctors, economists, historians, lawyers and psychiatrists, in the formation and implementation of Nazi policies, as well as some innovative studies of the interaction between the populace as a whole and the police agencies which enforced racial policy in both Germany and Austria, by, for example, David Bankier, Robert Gellately and David J. Horwitz.