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Nazism and race |
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Racial ideology
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Nazism developed several theories concerning races. They claimed to scientifically measure a strict hierarchy among "human race"; at the top was the "Nordic race", followed by lesser races. At the bottom of this hierarchy were "parasitic" races, or "Untermenschen" ("sub-humans"), which were perceived to be dangerous to society. Lowest of all in the Nazi racial policy were Gypsies and Jews. Gypsies and Jews were eventually deemed to be "Lebensunwertes Leben" ("Life unworthy of life"). Jews, and later Gypsies, became second-class citizens, expelled from Nazi Germany before being interned in concentration camps, then exterminated during the Holocaust (see Raul Hilberg's description of the various phases of the Holocaust). 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 of the Nazi glossary ideologically used to enforce popular racism in the German population.
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Philosophers and others theoreticians also participated to the elaboration of the 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 German1. The jurist 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.
Three books belonging to the scientific racism ideology, which claimed that perceived racial difference was hierarchical and central to social order, had a major influence on the trajectory of Nazi racial theories:2
American eugenicists traded ideas with their counterparts in Nazi Germany (Lombardo 2002; Kühl 1994).
Nazis developed an elaborate system of propaganda to diffuse these theories. Nazi architecture, for example, was used to create the "new order" and improve the "Aryan race." Sports were also seen by the Nazis as a way to "regenerate the race." The Hitler Youth, founded in 1922, had among its basic motivations the training of future "Aryan supermen" and future soldiers who would faithfully fight for the Third Reich. Cinema was also used to propagandize racist theories, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels' Propagandaministerium. The 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."3 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."3
Nazi racial theories soon translated into legislation, most notably with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The Action 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." The Nazi Regime also implemented a vast bureaucratic apparatus for making "racial determinations," the so-called ancestral proof (Abstammungsnachweis). Probably the vast majority of the population made such a proof during the course of the Third Reich.
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