Nazi racial theories

The Nazi Party adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications in order to justify the mass murder of people whom it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior or “master race", and they considered black people, Slavs, Gypsies, Jews and others racially inferior "sub-humans", only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism and anti-semitism.

Racial hierarchy

The Nazis claimed to observe a strict and scientific hierarchy of the human race. Adolf Hitler's views on race and people are found throughout Mein Kampf but more specifically, they are found in chapter 11, the title of which is "Nation and Race". The standard-issue propaganda text which was issued to members of the Hitler Youth contained a chapter on "the race of the German people" that heavily cited the works of Hans F. K. Günther. The text seems to address the European races in descending orders on the Nazi racial hierarchy, with the Nordic race (plus the sub-race of Phalic) first, the Western (Mediterranean) race second, Dinarics third, Eastern (Alpine) people fourth, and fifth and last, East Baltics.

Aryan: Nordic and Germanic

A poster advertising the 1938 Neues Volk calendar depicting "pure Aryans"

Hitler in his speeches and writings referred to the supposed existence of an "Aryan race" that he believed founded a superior type of humanity. According to Nazi ideology, the purest stock of Aryans was the Nordic people of Germany, England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The Nazis defined Nordics as being identified by their tall stature (average 175 cm [5 ft 9 in]), their long faces, their prominent chins, their narrow and straight or aquiline noses with a high base, their lean builds, their doliocephalic skulls, their straight and light hair, their light eyes, and their fair skin. The Nazis claimed that the Germanic peoples specifically represented a southern branch of the Aryan-Nordic population. The Nazis did not consider all Germans to be of the Nordic type (which predominated the north), and they stated that Germany also had a large "Alpine" population (its members were identified by, among other features, their lower stature, their stocky builds, their flatter noses, and their higher incidences of darker hair and eyes). Hitler and the Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther framed this as an issue which would be corrected through the selective breeding of "Nordic" traits.

Nazi propaganda to members of the Hitler Youth emphasized the "Nordic" nature of Germans, with the text issued to all Hitler Youth members stating: "the principal ingredient of our people is the Nordic race (55%). That is not to say that half our people are pure Nordics. All of the aforementioned races appear in mixtures in all parts of our fatherland. The circumstance, however, that the great part of our people is of Nordic descent justifies us taking a Nordic standpoint when evaluating our character and spirit, bodily structure, and physical beauty."

The matter of satisfactorily defining who precisely was an "Aryan” remained problematic throughout the existence of the Third Reich. In 1933, a definition of “Aryan” according to the Civil Service Law was deemed unacceptable by the Nazis because it included members of some non-Europeans ethnic groups; therefore, the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy redefined an “Aryan” as someone who was "tribally" related to "German blood".

After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, Wilhelm Stuckart defined "related blood" as:

So, when we speak of related blood, we mean the blood of those races that are determinative for the blood of the peoples who since time immemorial have a closed settlement area in Europe. Therefore, the members of the European peoples as well as their pure descendants in other parts of the world are essentially of related blood. However, one has to exclude the foreign-blooded, who can be found among every European people, such as the Jews and the human beings with a Negroid blood-impact.

In 1938, a brochure for the Nuremberg Party Rally included all European peoples as being of "related blood" to the Germans. However, soon after the invasion of Poland, the Nazis decided to relegate the Poles and other Slavs to a non-European status:

The German people were the only bearers of culture in the East and in their role as the main power of Europe protected Western culture and carried it into uncultivated regions. For centuries they constituted a barrier in the East against lack of culture (Unkultur) and protected the West against barbarity. They protected the borders from Slavs, Avars, and Magyars.

Jews, Roma and Slavs (including Poles, Serbs and Russians) were not considered Aryans by Nazi Germany. Instead, they were considered subhuman and inferior races.

Eastern Asian races were considered "Honorary Aryans"

Adolf Hitler and Mr. Kung Hsiang-hsi meeting in 1936

The Austronesians, Chinese and Japanese races were all considered the "Aryans of the East", "Honorary Aryans" and the "Herrenvolk of the Orient" (i.e. the "Master race" of the Orient) by Nazi Germany.

In 1945, Adolf Hitler said:

Pride in one's own race, and that does not imply contempt for other races, is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them.

Hitler invited Chinese soldiers to study in German military academies and serve in the Nazi German Wehrmacht as part of their combat training. Since 1926, Germany had supported the Republic of China militarily and industrially. Germany had also sent advisers such as Alexander von Falkenhausen and Hans von Seeckt to assist the Chinese, most notably in the Chinese Civil War and China's anti-communist campaigns. Max Bauer was sent to China and served as one of Chiang Kai-shek's advisers. Around this time, Hsiang-hsi Kung (H. H. Kung), the Republic of China Minister of Finance, visited Nazi Germany and was warmly welcomed by Adolf Hitler on 13 June 1937. During this meeting, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht bestowed upon Hsiang-hsi Kung an honorary doctorate degree, and attempted to open China's market to German exports. And in order to attract more Han Chinese students to study in Germany, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht earmarked 100,000 reichsmarks for Han Chinese students who were studying in the universities and military academies of Nazi Germany after they persuaded a German industrialist to set aside the money for that purpose. Additionally, Hsiang-hsi Kung, who favored commercial credits, politely refused a generous international loan which was offered by Adolf Hitler. The most famous of these Han Chinese Nazi soldiers was Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek, who studied military strategy and tactics at a Nazi German Kriegsschule in Munich, and subsequently acquired the rank of lieutenant and served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht on active combat duty in Europe until his return to the Republic of China during the later years of World War II.

Hitler had supported the Empire of Japan as early as 1904, when during the Russo-Japanese War it had defeated the Russians, which he considered a defeat for Austrian Slavism. He made a number of other statements expressing his respect and admiration for the Japanese in his book Mein Kampf.

Although they belonged to a different evolutionary race than the Germans did, the Han Chinese and the Imperial Japanese were both considered to have sufficiently superior qualities as were people with German-Nordic blood to warrant an alliance by Nazi ideologists such as Himmler. Himmler, who possessed a great interest in, and was influenced by, the anthropology, philosophies and pantheistic religions of East Asia, mentioned how his friend Hiroshi Ōshima, the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, believed that the noble castes in Japan, the Daimyō and the Samurai, were descended from gods of celestial origin, which was similar to Himmler's own belief that "the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle on the Atlantic continent."

Karl Haushofer, a German general, geographer, and geopolitician, whose ideas may have influenced the development of Hitler's expansionist strategies, saw Japan as the brother nation of Germany. In 1908, he was sent to Tokyo by the German Army "to study the Japanese Army and advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life and it also marked the beginning of his love affair with the orient. During the next four years, he traveled extensively in East Asia, adding Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin to his repertoire of languages, he also knew how to speak Russian, French, and English. Karl Haushofer had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and during his stay in the Far East, he was introduced to Oriental esoteric teachings." It was based on such teachings that he came to make similar bestowals of his own upon the Japanese people, calling them the "Aryans of the East", and even calling them the "Herrenvolk of the Orient" (i.e. the "Master race of the Orient").

The Chinese and Japanese were still subjected to Germany's racial laws, however, which—with the exception of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which specifically mentioned Jews – were generally applied to all "non-Aryans" but since the Eastern Asian peoples (excluding Koreans and Negritos) were considered "Honorary Aryans", these racial laws were applied to them in a more lenient manner in contrast to other "non-Aryans" who were not considered "Honorary Aryans" by Adolf Hitler. Hitler's government began to enact the laws after he came to power in 1933, and during that year, the Japanese government protested against several racial incidents which involved Japanese or Japanese-Germans. Later, these disputes were resolved when the Nazi high command treated its Japanese allies leniently. this was Especially the case after the collapse of Sino-German cooperation and the formation of the official alliance between Germany and Japan. After China declared war on Germany and joined the Allies, Chinese nationals were persecuted in Germany. The Influential Nazi anti-Semite Johann von Leers favored the exclusion of Japanese people from the laws because he believed in the existence of the alleged Japanese-Aryan racial link and because he sought to improve Germany's diplomatic relations with Japan. The Foreign Ministry supported von Leers and on several occasions between 1934 and 1937, it sought to change the laws, but other government agencies, including the Racial Policy Office, opposed the change.

An October 1933 statement by Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath which was published in response to the Japanese protests falsely claimed that Japanese were exempt. The wide publication of this statement caused many in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere to believe that such an exemption actually existed. Instead of granting Japanese a broad exemption from the laws, an April 1935 decree stated that any racial discrimination cases that might jeopardize German diplomatic relations because they involved non-Aryans—i.e., Japanese—would be dealt with individually. Decisions on such cases often took years to make, and those people who were affected by them were unable to obtain jobs or interracially marry, primarily because the German government preferred to avoid exempting people from the laws as much as possible. The German government often exempted more German-Japanese than it preferred to because it wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1933 controversies. And in 1934, it prohibited the German press from discussing the race laws with regard to Japanese.

Aryans: Uralic peoples

The Nazis, in an attempt to find a satisfactory definition of 'Aryan' were faced with a dilemma with regard to the European peoples who did not speak an Indo-European language or Aryan language, namely Estonians, Finns and Hungarians. In 1933, a definition of 'Aryan' that was given by Albert Gorter for the Civil Service Law stated:

The Aryans (also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten) are one of the three branches of the Caucasian (white race); they are divided into the western (European), that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern (Asiatic) Aryans, that is the Indian (Hindu) and Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd). Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of two other races, namely the Mongolian (yellow) and the Negroid (black) races; 2. the members of the two other branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites (Jews, Arabs) and Hamites (Berbers). The Finns and the Hungarians belong to the Mongoloid race; but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of the European Volk are Aryans...

However, that definition was deemed unacceptable because it included some non-European peoples. Gorter changed the definition of 'Aryan' to the definition that was given by the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy (Sachverstandigenbeirats fur Bevolkerungs- und Rassenpolitik) which was, "An Aryan is one who is tribally related (stammverivandte) to German blood. An Aryan is the descendant of a Volk domiciled in Europe in a closed tribal settlement (Volkstumssiedlung) since recorded history”. That definition of ‘Aryan’ included Estonians, Finns and Hungarians. In 1938 a commentary was made about the Nuremberg Laws that proclaimed that "the overwhelming majority" of Finns and Hungarians were of Aryan blood.

Estonians

In 1941, Nazi Germany established the Reichskommissariat Ostland in order to administer the conquered territory of Estonia. The colonial department in Berlin under Minister Alfred Rosenberg (born in Tallinn in 1893) favorably looked upon Estonians as Finno-Ugrics and thus, it looked upon them as "Aryans", Generalkommissar Karl-Siegmund Litzmann authorized the establishment of a Landeseigene Verwaltung, or a local national administration.

During the war, Hitler remarked that the Estonian contained a lot of “Germanic blood”.

Finns

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, a Soviet air attack on Finnish cities initiated the Continuation War; Finland in cooperation with German units in Finland invaded the USSR. Finland fought the USSR primarily in order to recover the territories which it was forced to cede to the USSR after the Moscow Peace Treaty which ended the Winter War between the Finns and the Soviets. In November 1942, owing to Finland's substantial military contribution to the German war effort on the northern flank of the Eastern Front of World War II, Hitler decreed that "from now on Finland and the Finnish people be treated and designated as a Nordic state and a Nordic people", which he considered one of the highest compliments that the Nazi government could bestow upon another country. Hitler stated in private conversation that:

After their first conflict with the Russians, the Finns applied to me, proposing that their country should become a German protectorate. I don't regret having rejected this offer. As a matter of fact, the heroic attitude of this people, which has spent a hundred of the six hundred years of its history in fighting, deserves the greatest respect. It is infinitely better to have this people of heroes as allies than to incorporate it in the Germanic Reich—which, in any case, would not fail to provoke complications in the long run. The Finns cover one of our flanks, Turkey covers the other. That's an ideal solution for me as far as our political protective system is concerned.

Hungarians

According to the Interior Ministry, Hungarians were "tribally alien" (ifremdstammig) but were not necessarily "blood alien", which added to even more confusion with regard to defining Hungarians on a racial basis. In 1934 a brochure from the series Family, Race, Volk in the National Socialist State simply stated that the Magyars (which it did not define) were Aryans. But, the following year an article in the Journal for Racial Science on the "Racial Diagnosis of the Hungarians", remarked that "opinions on the racial condition of the Hungarians are still very divided". As late as 1943, the question of whether a Hungarian woman was to be allowed to marry a German man was disputed; she was determined to be of 'related blood' and they were allowed to get married.

Aryans: Lower classes

British people

According to Gunther, the purest Nordic regions were Scandinavia and northern Germany, particularly Norway and Sweden, specifying: "We may, perhaps, take the Swedish blood to be over 80 per cent Nordic, the Norwegian blood about 80 per cent." Britain and southern Germany by contrast were not considered entirely Nordic. Germany was said to be 55% Nordic, and the rest Alpine (particularly southern Germany), Dinaric, or East Baltic (particularly eastern Germany). On the British Isles, Gunther stated: "we may adopt the following racial proportions for these islands: Nordic blood, 60 percent; Mediterranean, 30 percent; Alpine, 10 percent." He added that "The Nordic strain in Germany seems to be rather more distributed over the whole people than in England, where it seems to belong far more to the upper classes." Hitler echoed this sentiment, referring to the English lower classes as "racially inferior".

Up until November 1938 when relations between Germany and Britain worsened, Nazi propaganda had depicted the British people as an example of the racial superiority of the Aryan race pointing out that they had an empire and ruled over millions of non-Aryans. Soon afterwards, the British people were described as "the Jew among the Aryan peoples" and plutocrats fighting for money.

French people

Hitler viewed the French as close to the Germans racially, but not quite their peers. He said of their racial character: "France remains hostile to us. She contains, in addition to her Nordic blood, a blood that will always be foreign to us." Gunther echoed this sentiment, saying that the French were predominantly Alpine and Mediterranean rather than Nordic, but that a heavy Nordic strain was still present. He characterized the French as possessing the following racial proportions: Nordic, 25%; Alpine or Dinaric, 50%; Mediterranean, 25%. These types were said to be most prevalent in north, central, and southern France respectively.

Hitler planned to remove a large portion of the French population to make way for German settlement. The Zone interdite of eastern France was set aside and planned to be made part of the German Reich after the rest of France was fully subdued. The French residents of the zone, some 7 million people accounting for nearly 20% of the French population at the time, were to be deported, and the land then occupied by at least a million German settlers. The plan was either postponed or abandoned after Operation Barbarossa in favor of expediting the settlement of the east instead and was never put into place owing to the German defeat in the Second World War.

Mediterranean Aryans

The Nazis regarded Southern Europeans such as southern French, Greeks, central/southern Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards as sharing a similar origin with Germans due to ancient Indo-Aryan migrations, but being almost purely of a distinct so-called Mediterranean race. Hitler believed that the Ancient Greeks were the ancestors of Germans.

Despite classifying these populations as Aryans, and regarding them as superior in the arts compared to Nordics and Germans, the Nazis considered them to be less industrious than predominantly Nordic peoples like the Germans and English were, and in keeping with this view, the Nazis considered them to be marginally inferior to the Nordic race. In Nazi propaganda the "Mediterranean" race was described as brown-haired, brown-eyed, light skinned but slightly darker than their Northern European counterparts, and short (average 1.62 m [5 ft 4 in]), with dolichocephalic or mesocephalic skulls, and lean builds. People who fit this category were described as "lively, even loquacious" and "excitable, even passionate", but they were also described as being "prone to act more on feeling than on reason", and as a result, "this race has produced only a few outstanding men."

The question of the South Tyrol was largely and pragmatically dealt with by Hitler and Mussolini: this region of Austria's Tyrol, which was annexed by Italy after 1919, would not become a constituent district of Ostmark (present-day Austria). Ethnic Germans who lived in the South Tyrol were given the option of either migrating back to the German Reich or remaining in the South Tyrol where they would undergo forced Italianization.

Italians

Nazi racial theorists questioned the amount of Aryan blood Italians had. Hitler himself viewed northern Italians as strongly Aryan, but not southern Italians. The Nazis viewed the downfall of the Roman Empire as being caused by racial intermixing, claiming that Italians were a hybrid of races, including black African races. When Hitler met Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in June 1934 he told him that all Mediterranean peoples were "tainted" by Negro blood.

Greeks

During a speech in 1920, Hitler claimed that civilisation in Greece came from Aryans. In his unpublished second book in 1928 he wrote that Sparta must be regarded the first Folkish State and in a speech in August 1929 he reiterated the same thought by stating that Sparta was the "purest racial state" in history.

Alfred Rosenberg believed that the civilisation of Ancient Greek was the result of an "Aryan-Greek race soul". Heinrich Himmler instructed the people carrying out Ahnenerbe think tank to study the "Indo-Germanic and Aryan" origins of Greece.

Eastern Aryans

During the mid-1930s foreign diplomats from Iran and Turkey who visited Germany wanted to know what the Nazis regarded them as since they spoke Indo-European languages. The Nazis concluded that the Indo-European language speakers (including Proto-Indo-European languages, such as the Anatolian language), from Asia such as the Iranians and Turks were Aryans. The Nazis regarded the Turks to be Europeans.

Iranians

Hitler meeting Iranian ambassador Mussa Nuri Esfandiari

Beginning in 1933, the Nazi leadership in Germany made efforts to increase their influence in Iran, and they financed and managed a racist journal, Iran-e Bastan, co-edited by a pro-Nazi Iranian, Abdulrahman Saif Azad. This and other chauvinistic publications in the 1930s were popular among Iranian elites; they "highlighted the past and the pre-Islamic glories of the Persian nation and blamed the supposedly 'savage Arabs and Turks' for the backwardness of Iran." In Iran:

The Nazis found a favorable climate amongst the Iranian elite to spread fascistic and racist propaganda. The Nazi propaganda machine advocated the (supposedly) common Aryan ancestry of "the two Nations." In order to further cultivate racist tendencies, in 1936 the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were 'pure-blooded' Aryans ... In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn among Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblance among these leaders.

Nazi ideology was most common among Persian officials, elites, and intellectuals, but "even some members of non-Persian groups were eager to identify themselves with the Nazis" and a supposed Aryan race. Hitler declared Iran to be an "Aryan state"; the changing of Persia's international name to Iran in 1935 was done by the Shah at the suggestion of the German ambassador to Iran as an act of "Aryan solidarity".

In 1936, the Nazi Office of Racial Politics, in response to a question from the German Foreign Ministry, classified non-Jewish Turks as Europeans, but "left unanswered the question of how to think about the obviously non-European Arabs, Persians, and Muslims." Later that year, ahead of the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis responded to questions from the Egyptians by saying that the Nuremberg racial laws did not apply to them, and after the Iranian ambassador to Berlin "assured German officials that 'there was no doubt that the Iranian, as an Aryan,' was 'racially kindred (artverwandt) with the Germans," the German Foreign Ministry "assured the Iranian Embassy in Berlin that the correct distinction between was not between "Aryans and non-Aryans" but rather between "persons of German and related blood on one hand and Jews as well as racially alien on the other."

Historian Jeffrey Herf writes:

As a result of the discussions of spring and summer 1936, Nazi officials had reassured Arab diplomats that Nazi ideology and policy were directed against the Jews, not non-Jewish Semites. Nazism viewed Arabs and Muslims as different but, in clear contrast to the racial hierarchy presented in Mein Kampf, not as racially inferior. But as it was best that races not mix, non-Jewish Germans should marry other non-Jewish Germans. These abstruse discussions of the meaning of blood and race in summer 1936 offered a legal and conceptual foundation for reconciling German racial ideology and legislation with close and ongoing work with non-Jewish Semites, that is, Arabs and Muslims, before and during World War II. As a consequence of the exchanges of spring and summer 1936 and the Egyptian and Iranian decisions to attend the summer Olympics, German officials learned that they could reconcile Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish policies with efforts to find allies among non-Jewish Semites. They also learned that at least some Arab and Persian diplomats had no principled opposition to anti-Semitism so long as it was only aimed at Jews and even had become accustomed to thinking about peoples and nations in the racist categories emerging from the National Socialist regime.

Turks

After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, the question of racially classifying Turks became a debated topic for the Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy. In January 1936, there were reports of Germans with Turkish ancestry experiencing difficulties by the state and the Nazi Party. The German Foreign Ministry stated that it was "essential that determination of whether the Turks are Aryan be decided as soon as possible" so he could tell the Turkish Embassy a "satisfactory answer". German diplomats were instructed answer to any enquiry about it that: "in Germany the Turkish people are seen as a European people and that therefore the individual Turkish citizen receives the same treatment by German race law as the members of other European states". That decision prompted the Turkish press to publish newspapers with the headline, "The Turks are Aryans!".

Georgians

There is some evidence that Hitler saw Georgians as lower class Aryans although he mistrusted them, saying:

Georgians are not a Turkish people; rather a typical Caucasian tribe, probably even with some Nordic blood in them... The only ones I consider to be reliable are the pure Muslims, which means the real Turkish nations.

Compared to other Soviet nationalities, Georgians were given preferential treatment and there was even a Georgian Legion. Hitler also theorized that Joseph Stalin's Georgian ethnicity, as well as the fact that the Georgian SSR was nominally autonomous, would eventually draw the Georgians closer to the USSR than to Germany. Several Georgian scholars such as Alexander Nikuradze and Michael Achmeteli served as advisors for Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg.

On 24 August 1939 during the meeting of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Hitler asked his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to photograph Georgian-born Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's earlobes to determine whether or not he was an "Aryan" or a "Jew". Himmler regarded Stalin as being descended from lost “Nordic-Germanic-Aryan blood”.

Slavs

John Connelly argues that the Nazi policies carried out against the Slavs cannot be fully explained by the racist theories endorsed by the Nazis because of the contradictions and opportunism that occurred during World War II.

The Nazis thought that Eastern Europe, namely the areas whose inhabitants speak Slavic languages, was the most racially inferior part of Europe, and very distinct from the rest of Europe.

Günther in his book The Racial Science of Europe wrote that the Slavs were originally Nordic but over the centuries had mixed with other races. In The Racial Elements of European History he wrote: "The east of Europe shows a gradual transition of the racial mixtures of Central Europe into predominantly East Baltic and Inner Asiatic regions... Owing to the likeness between East Baltic and Inner Asiatic bodily characters it will often be hard to fix a sharp boundary between these two races”. He noted that the Nordic race was prominently found along the Vistula, the Neva, the Dwina and in southern Volhynia, but the further south and east, the East Baltic race became more common and finally in some regions there was “a strong Inner Asiatic admixture”. In the Russian-speaking regions he estimated were between at 25 per cent and 30 per cent Nordic. In the Polish regions there was an increase in the East Baltic race, Alpine race and Inner Asiatic the further east.

Günther, who greatly influenced Hitler and Nazi ideology, studied and wrote about the supposed racial origins of the Slavs. He concluded that Slavs were originally Nordic, but after mixing with other races over the centuries they eventually became to be predominantly of the East Baltic race. However, some Poles and other Slavs were considered to have enough Nordic admixture to be Germanised, because they were supposedly descended from the Nordic ruling class of the Early Slavs. He wrote that the further East the more the "Inner Asiatic" racial ancestry was prominent. Of the Poles and other Slavs who were of the East Baltic race, he wrote that they were mentally slow, dirty and incapable of long term planning. He also claimed that the East Baltic race was the reason why some German districts had “a heavy proportion of crime."

To just Lebensraum (living space) for Germans, the Nazis later described Slavs, mainly the Poles, Serbs and Russians, along with Jews and Romani (Gypsies) as “subhumans”.

Croats

Hitler remarked about the Croats during his table talk:

If the Croats were part of the Reich, we'd have them serving as faithful auxiliaries of the German Fuehrer, to police our marches. Whatever happens, one shouldn't treat them as Italy is doing at present. The Croats are a proud people. They should be bound directly to the Fuehrer by an oath of loyalty. Like that, one could rely upon them absolutely. When I have Kvaternik standing in front of me, I behold the very type of the Croat as I've always known him, unshakeable in his friendships, a man whose oath is eternally binding. The Croats are very keen on not being regarded as Slavs. According to them, they're descended from the Goths. The fact that they speak a Slav language is only an accident, they say.

Czechs

Although Hitler considered Czechs to be of Mongolian origin, in accordance with the idea of completely Germanising the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1940 he agreed with racial anthropologists that up to 50% of Czechs contained enough Nordic blood that they could be Germanised, while the "Mongoloid types" and the Czech intelligentsia were not to be Germanized and were to be “deprived of their power, eliminated, and shipped out of the country by all sorts of methods.” In 1941 Hitler praised the "hard work and inventiveness of the Czechs" to his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and a year later he remarked that the Czechs were "industrious and intelligent workers".

Poles

Poster (in German and Polish): Obligations of Polish Workers in Germany which included the death penalty for sexual relations with a German

Hitler thought of Poles as a foreign race and in Mein Kampf he criticised earlier attempts to Germanise ethnic Poles because he argued that the racial inferiority of the Poles would weaken the German nation.

Günther regarded Northern Poland as being predominantly Nordic and that the Nordic race was to be found amongst the upper classes

An influential figure among German racist theorists was Otto Reche, who became director of the Institute for Racial and Ethnic Sciences in Lipsk and advocated the genocide of the Polish nation. In this position he wrote that ethnic Poles were "an unfortunate mixture" consisting among others of Slavs, Balts and Mongolians, and that they should be eliminated to avoid possible mixing with the German race. When Germany invaded Poland he wrote "We need Raum (space), but no Polish lice on our fur".

After the invasion of Poland, Nazi propaganda began to depict Poles as subhumans.

Joseph Goebbels in his diary on 10 October 1939 wrote what Hitler thought of the Poles:

The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid, and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of a mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgment is absolutely nil.

Goebbels and Hitler believed that Asia began in Poland.

The Polish decrees that were about forced Polish workers working in Germany and were enacted on 8 May 1940 stated that any Polish man or woman for having sexual intercourse with a German man or woman. German women who had sexual intercourse with Polish workers had their heads shaved and were then forced to have a placard around her neck detailing her crime and paraded around the place where she lived. After 1940, Poles were regularly hanged without a trial for accusations of sexual intercourse with German women.

During the war Hitler stated that Germans should not mix with Poles in order to prevent any “Germanic blood” being transmitted to the Polish ruling class.

Russians

Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that, “The organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race”.

Himmler gave a speech in Stettin to Waffen SS soldiers of the Eastern Front Battle Group "Nord" and said that the war was a battle of “ideologies and struggle races”. He argued that it was between Nazism that was based on “the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood” against “the 180 millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable” which soldiers should “shoot without pity or mercy” and reminded the soldiers who were fighting in the war that they were fighting against “the same subhumans, against the same inferior races” that had appeared under different names 1,000 years ago, but reminded them that they were now called “Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism”.

Nazi propaganda depicted Russians as “Asiatic hordes”, “Mongol storm”, and “subhumans”.

Goebbels wrote an essay on 19 July 1942 titled “The So-Called Russian Soul” in which he argued that the Russians’ stubborn manner was down to their national character being “animalistic”.

Ukrainians

The Reichskommissar of Ukraine Erich Koch on 5 March 1943 said:

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.

Koch publicly referred to Ukrainians as “niggers”.

Jews

A fragment of the exposition Der Ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew"), which demonstrates "typical" anatomical traits of the Jews

Hitler shifted the blame for Germany's losses in the First World War upon "enemies from within". In the face of the economic hardship which was triggered by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), Jews who resided in Germany were blamed for sabotaging the country. Therefore, the Nazis considered them the most inferior race and they also used derogatory terms such as Untermensch (sub-human) and Schwein (pig).

In his works, for instance, in Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes ("Ethnology of the Jewish people"), Günther stated that Jews predominantly belonged to the "Near Eastern race" (often known as the “Armenoid race"). He thought that Jews had become so racially mixed that they could possibly be regarded as a "race of the second order". He described Ashkenazi Jews as being mixed of Near Eastern, Oriental, East Baltic, Inner-Asian, Nordic, Hamite and Negro, and Sephardi Jews as being mixed of Oriental, Near Eastern, Mediterranean, Hamite, Nordic, and Negro. He believed that Jews had physical characteristics different to Europeans. After concluding the racial origins of Jews, Günther began to develop theories about why Jews were so distinguishable as a people and why they were different from European peoples; he wrote that it was because of the way they looked, spoke, gestured and smelled.

Romani people (Gypsies)

Main article: Porajmos § Aryan racial purity

Eva Justin measuring the skull of a Romani woman

The Nazis believed that Gypsies were originally Aryan, but over the centuries due to their nomadic lifestyle they had mixed with non-Aryans and therefore regarded them as an “alien race”. Gypsies were subjected to the Nuremberg Laws and were forbidden from having sexual relations and marriages with people of "German or related blood" and were stripped of their citizenship.

The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit in 1936. It was headed by Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this Unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a "Gypsy law".

After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to determine the racial classification of the Roma, the Unit decided that most Romani, whom they had concluded were not of "pure Gypsy blood", posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as had been done by the United States for its Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies. The necessary legal foundation can only be created through a Gypsy Law, which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existences of Gypsies in the living space of the German nation.

Although the law Himmler wanted never was enacted, in 1938 he advised that to solve the “Gypsy Question” it could be done “on the basis of race”.

Black people

Main article: Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany

Nazi propaganda showing the difference between Aryan Germans and non-Aryan black people

Hitler in Mein Kampf described children resulting from European women and African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the Aryan race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He blamed the Jews for that by writing that they “were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, saying the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".

The mixed-race children who were believed to have been were born from French army soldiers of African descent and white French women after World War I were known as Rhineland Bastards.

The Nazis banned jazz music because they deemed it to be “corrupt Negro music”. The Nazis believed that the existence of jazz in Germany was a Jewish plot to dominate Germany and the non-Jewish German people and destroy German culture.

Nazi Eugen Fischer who was a professor of anthropology and eugenics thought that the small black population should be sterilised to protect the German people. In 1938 at least 400 black children were forcibly sterilised in the Rhineland.

Black people were subjected to the Nuremberg Laws and were not allowed to be Reich citizens and were forbidden from having sexual relations and marriages with people of “German or related blood” (Aryans).

Racialist ideology

Ideology

Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany

Different Nazis offered a range of pseudo-religious or pseudoscientific arguments to prove the Aryan race was superior. The central dogma of Aryan superiority was espoused by officials throughout the party using scientific racist propaganda.

An Untermensch would be stripped of all of his/her rights, he or she would be treated like an animal, his or her life would be considered worthless, a Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of living) and he or she would only be considered fit for enslavement and extermination.

During their schooling, Nazi ideology taught German youths to understand the differences which supposedly existed between the Nordic German "Übermenschen" and the "ignoble" Jewish and Slavic "subhumans". An illustration of this ideology was described in the 1990s by a German Jewish woman, who vividly recalled hearing Nazis sing, "When Jewish blood squirts from my knife" while they marched by her home in central Germany in the mid-1930s. A biography of Lise Meitner says "In the Reichstag the NSDAP deputies stretched their arms in the Nazi salute and sang their party anthem, the Horst Wessellied: "SA marching ... Jew blood in the streets".'

Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, popularized the expression "Blut und Boden" ("Blood and Soil"), one of the many terms in the Nazi glossary ideologically used to enforce popular racism in the German population. There were many academic and administrative scholars of race who all had somewhat divergent views of racism, including Alfred Rosenberg and Hans F. K. Günther.

Fischer and Lenz were appointed to senior positions which enabled them to oversee the policy of racial hygiene. The Nazi state used such ideas about the differences which supposedly existed between European races as justifications for their various discriminatory and coercive policies which culminated in the Holocaust.

The first (1916) edition of the American eugenicist Madison Grant's popular book The Passing of the Great Race classified Germans as being primarily Nordic, but the second edition, published after the US had entered WWI, reclassified the now-enemy power as being dominated by "inferior" Alpines, a tradition echoed in the work of Harvard Professor of Anthropology Carleton Coon's work The Races of Europe (1939).

Günther's work stated that the Germans are definitely not a fully Nordic people, and divided them into Western (Mediterranean), Nordic, Eastern (Alpine), East Baltic and Dinaric races. Hitler himself was later to downplay the importance of Nordicism in public for this very reason. The simplistic tripartite model of Grant which divided Europeans into only Alpine, Mediterranean, and Nordic, Günther did not use, and erroneously placed most of the population of Hitler's Germany in the Alpine category, especially after the Anschluss. This has been used to downplay the Nordic presence in Germany. Gunther considered Jews an "Asiatic race inferior to all European races".

Many German nationalists in Weimar Republic viewed the Armenian genocide as a justified act. This was related to their categorization of Armenians as an inferior race.

J. Kaup led a movement opposed to Günther. Kaup took the view that a German nation, all of whose citizens belonged to a "German race" in a populationist sense, offered a more convenient sociotechnical tool than Günther's concept of an ideal Nordic type to which only a very few Germans could belong. Nazi legislation identifying the ethnic and "racial" affinities of the Jews reflects the populationist concept of race. Discrimination was not restricted to Jews who belonged to the "Semitic-Oriental-Armenoid" and/or "Nubian-African/Negroid" races, but was directed against all members of the Jewish ethnic population.

The German Jewish journalist Kurt Caro, who emigrated to Paris in 1933 and served in the French and British armies, published a book under the pseudonym Manuel Humbert unmasking Hitler's Mein Kampf in which he stated the following racial composition of the Jewish population of Central Europe: 23.8% Lapponoid race, 21.5% Nordic race, 20.3% Armenoid race, 18.4% Mediterranean race, 16.0% Oriental race.

By 1939 Hitler had abandoned Nordicist rhetoric in favor of the idea that the German people as a whole were united by distinct "spiritual" qualities. Nevertheless, Nazi eugenics policies continued to favor Nordics over Alpines and other racial groups, particularly during the war when decisions were being made about the incorporation of conquered peoples into the Reich. The Lebensborn program sought to extend the Nordic race. In 1942 Hitler stated in private,

I shall have no peace of mind until I have planted a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration. If at the time of the migrations, while the great racial currents were exercising their influence, our people received so varied a share of attributes, these latter blossomed to their full value only because of the presence of the Nordic racial nucleus.

Hitler and Himmler planned to use the SS as the basis for the racial "regeneration" of Europe following the final victory of Nazism. The SS was to be a racial elite chosen on the basis of "pure" Nordic qualities.

Addressing officers of the SS-Leibstandarte "Adolf Hitler" Himmler stated:

The ultimate aim for those 11 years during which I have been the Reichsfuehrer SS has been invariably the same: to create an order of good blood which is able to serve Germany; which unfailingly and without sparing itself can be made use of because the greatest losses can do no harm to the vitality of this order, the vitality of these men, because they will always be replaced; to create an order which will spread the idea of Nordic blood so far that we will attract all Nordic blood in the world, take away the blood from our adversaries, absorb it so that never again, looking at it from the viewpoint of grand policy, Nordic blood, in great quantities and to an extent worth mentioning, will fight against us.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr Robert Ritter

Around 120,000 prisoners of war from French-ruled Africa were captured by the Germans in 1940 during the Battle of France. Unlike other French captives, they were not deported to Germany for fear of racial defilement.

In philosophy

Philosophers and other theoreticians participated in the elaboration of Nazi ideology. The relationship between Heidegger and Nazism has remained a controversial subject in the history of philosophy, even today. According to the philosopher Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger said of Spinoza that he was "ein Fremdkörper in der Philosophie", a "foreign body in philosophy"—Faye notes that Fremdkörper was a term which belonged to the Nazi glossary, and not to classical German. However, Heidegger did to a certain extent criticize racial science, particularly in his Nietzsche lectures, which reject biologism in general, while generally speaking even Heidegger's most German nationalist and pro-Nazi works of the early 30s, such as his infamous Rectorial address, lack any overtly racialized language. Thus it is problematic to connect Heidegger with any racial theory. Carl Schmitt elaborated a philosophy of law praising the Führerprinzip and the German people, while Alfred Baeumler instrumentalized Nietzsche's thought, in particular his concept of the "Will to Power", in an attempt to justify Nazism.

Propaganda and implementation of racial theories

Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The Nazis developed an elaborate system of propaganda and they used it to diffuse these theories. Nazi architecture, for example, was used to create the "new order" and improve the "Aryan race". The Nazis also believed that they could use Sports to "regenerate the race" by exposing supposedly inferior peoples, namely the Jews, as slovenly, sedentary and out-of-shape. One of the basic motivations of the Hitler Youth, founded in 1922, was the training of future "Aryan supermen" and future soldiers who would faithfully fight for the Third Reich.

German cinema was also used to promote racist theories, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels' Propagandaministerium. The German Hygiene Museum in Dresden diffused racial theories. A 1934 poster of the museum shows a man with distinctly African features and reads, "If this man had been sterilized there would not have been born ... 12 hereditarily diseased."(sic). According to the current director Klaus Voegel, "The Hygiene Museum was not a criminal institute in the sense that people were killed here," but "it helped to shape the idea of which lives were worthy and which were worthless."

Nazi racial theories were soon translated into legislation, the most notable pieces of legislation were the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The Aktion T4 euthanasia program, in which the Kraft durch Freude (KdF, literally "Strength Through Joy") youth organization participated, targeted people accused of representing a danger of "degeneration" towards the "Deutsche Volk". Under the race laws, sexual relations between Aryans (cf. Aryan certificate) and non-Aryans known as Rassenschande ("race defilement") became punishable by law. To preserve the "racial purity" of the German blood, after the beginning of the war the Nazis extended the race defilement law to include all foreigners (non-Germans).

Despite the laws against Rassenschande or miscegenation, allegations which state that Nazi soldiers raped Jewish women during the Holocaust have surfaced.

The Nazi regime required all German people who wanted to be citizens of the Reich to produce proof of Aryan ancestry. Certain exceptions were made when Hitler issued the "German Blood Certificate" for those people who were classified as having partial Aryan ancestry and partial Jewish ancestry by the race laws.

During World War II, Germanization efforts were carried out in Central and Eastern Europe in order to cull those people of "German blood" who lived there. This started with the classification of people into the Volksliste. Those people who were considered German and selected for inclusion in the Volksliste were either kidnapped and sent to Germany to undergo Germanization, or they were killed in order to prevent "German blood" from being used against the Nazis. In regions of Poland, many Poles were either murdered or deported in order to make room for Baltic Germans induced to emigrate after the pact with the USSR. Efforts were made to identify people of German descent with Nordic traits from pre-war citizens of Poland. If these individuals passed the screening process test and were considered "racially valuable", they were abducted from their parents to be Germanized and then sent to Germany to be raised as Germans. Those children who failed such tests might be used as subjects in medical experiments or as slave laborers in German industry.

Western countries, such as France, were treated less roughly because they were viewed as racially superior to the "subhuman" Poles who were to be enslaved and exterminated, though they were not considered as good as full Germans were; a complex of racial categories was boiled down by the average German to mean that "East is bad and West is acceptable." Still, extensive racial classification was practiced in France, for future uses.

References

Notes

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