How to track down the Nazi magazines on the 'Rhineland Bastards'

The hunt for the Nancy magazines on the 'Rhineland Bastards'

Digital newspaper archives have turned into a bibliographical rarity what was, in 1934, an instrument of racial propaganda. The magazine 'Neues Volk' ('New People'), the organ of the NSDAP's Racial Policy Office, published in issue 4 of volume 2 an article signed by the anthropologist and physician Wolfgang Abel: 'Bastarde am Rhein' ('Bastards on the Rhine'), pages 4 to 7. That is the exact reference any researcher needs to locate the original document.

Anyone looking for the other publication mentioned in the search – the 'Frankfurter Volksblatt' (1933-1943), the party's official organ for Hesse-Nassau – faces a more complex path. Frankfurt University Library holds the largest collection of historical press in the region, with catalogued runs of the publication. The German National Library and the state catalogues of German universities offer digitised or physical copies of 'Neues Volk'.

Interest in these documents is not merely historiographical. They form part of the record of the campaign against the so-called 'Rhineland Bastards', children born to German women and Allied soldiers after the First World War, whom the regime subjected to marginalisation and forced sterilisation. The original materials by Abel are also preserved in university collections, making it possible to reconstruct the pseudoscience that justified that policy.

Ironically, the documentation once used to design abhorrent policies of exclusion has now become a puzzle for librarians and rare-item hunters. With the technical reference – year, volume, issue and pages – anyone can request to consult the copies. The difficulty no longer lies in the name, but in access. And that, perhaps, is the best news.