Master race
[2] The Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg believed that the "Nordic race" was descended from Proto-Indo-Europeans, who he thought had pre-historically dwelt on the North German Plain and may have ultimately originated on the lost island of Atlantis.
The Slavs, Roma, and Jews were defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan "Untermenschen", and were thus considered a danger to the Aryan or Germanic master race.
[5] According to the Nazi secret Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population was to be removed from Central Europe through expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination,[6] except for a small percentage who were deemed to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers, and thus suitable for Germanisation.
[8] Classical liberal theorists such as Volney and Sieyès refuted this theory by demonstrating that the French nobility was primarily composed of nouveaux riches from all over the country.
Chamberlain classified all European peoples, including Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins, as the "Aryan race", which was built on ancient Proto-Indo-European culture.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was believed that Indo-Europeans (generally referred to as Aryans) were the highest branch of humanity due to their technological advancement.
Babies were judged based on livestock standards such as height, weight, unblemished skin, well-formed fingers, lack of excess fat, and cooperative behavior.
Gobineau's basic concept, as further refined and developed in Nazism, placed black Indigenous Australians and Equatorial Africans at the bottom of the hierarchy, while white Northern and Western Europeans (which consisted of Germans, Swedes, Icelanders, Norwegians, Danes, British, Irish, Dutch, Belgian and Northern French) were placed at its top; olive skinned white Southern Europeans (who consisted of Southern French, Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Romanians, and Greeks, i.e., those who were called the Mediterranean race, were regarded as another sub-race of the Caucasian race) and placed in its upper middle ranks; and the Semitic and Hamitic races (supposed sub-races of the Caucasian race) were placed in its lower-middle ranks (because the Jews, were Semites, the Nazis believed their cleverness made them extremely dangerous – they had their own plan for Jewish world domination, a conspiracy which needed to be opposed by all thoughtful Aryans).
[4] Slavs such as Poles and Russians were not considered Aryans;[5] and neither were the members of the Mongoloid race (including its offshoots such as Malayans, American Indians) and mixed-race people such as Eurasians, the bronze Mestizos, Mulattos, Afro-Asians, and Zambos were placed in its lower middle ranks.
Germany's immediate goal was Drang nach Osten or expansion into the East, which was the first phase in its ultimate plan to conquer Europe, and Ukraine's "chernozem" (black earth) soil was regarded as a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the "Herrenvolk" (listenⓘ) ("master people").
[28]The Oxford English Dictionary records that William J. Grayson used the phrase "master race" in his poem The Hireling and the Slave (1855): For these great ends hath Heaven’s supreme command Brought the black savage from his native land, Trains for each purpose his barbarian mind, By slavery tamed, enlightened, and refined; Instructs him, from a master-race, to draw Wise modes of polity and forms of law, Imbues his soul with faith, his heart with love, Shapes all his life by dictates from above where the phrase denotes the relation between the white masters and negro slaves.
The racial term Untermensch originates from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the earliest proponents of a theory presenting a hierarchical racial model of history, attributing civilisational primacy to the "white races" who gained their sensitivity and intelligence by refinement in the rigorous north.
He describes the treatment of "[our] innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into [the slave master's] devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record".
The Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen.
[48][49][50] Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of ancient Mediterranean peoples.
[51] Following the ideas of Gobineau and others, the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg determined that these people, who, he claimed, were originally from Atlantis, were a dynamic warrior people who dwelt in northern climates on the North German Plain in prehistoric times, from which they migrated southeast by riding their chariots, eventually reaching Ukraine, Iran, and then India.
In order to eliminate "defective" citizens and rid the country of the intellectually disabled or those who were born with genetic deficiencies, as well as those who were deemed racially inferior, the T-4 Euthanasia Program was administered by Karl Brandt, one of Hitler's personal physicians.
[57]For the "Greater Aryan certificate" Germans had to prove that as far back as January 1, 1800 "none of their paternal nor their maternal ancestors had Jewish or coloured blood".
During a speech he made in 1936, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said: Today arises in young and old, high and low, poor and rich, the will that the German nation must again be a world people.
[60]During the Meiji era, a sense of superiority over other Asians existed in the Japanese society, with discrimination being enacted against even against racial minorities such as the Ryūkyū and Ainu peoples.
The Mediterranean race was also a major influence to the outside world in the modern era: during the 16th century, Spain and Portugal established the first global empires in Western history, placing both nations on the highest level of political and economic powers in Europe.
"[64] The Nazis explained this by claiming that the original Latins and Greeks were Indo-European Nordic tribes which had migrated into Italy and Greece, during the Iron Age era.
The Nazis also claimed that the Spanish and Portuguese Empires were examples of Nordic power since, at the time, their governments were run by the descendants of the Germanic Visigoths who invaded Spain and Portugal fifteen centuries earlier.
[52] Aryan master race ideology was common throughout the educated intellectual community and literate strata of the Western world until the post-World War II era.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the original Buck Rogers stories and newspaper cartoons, Buck Rogers, in his adventures in the 25th century that takes place on Earth, depicts him fighting for Aryan-Americans from the liberated zone around Niagara, New York, against the Red Mongol Empire, a Chinese empire of the future which rules most of North America.
"[66] The German writer Michael Ende, who was born in 1929 and grew up reading such books, wrote his classic novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver in the 1950s, as a way of opposing the Nazi propaganda he was taught as a child.
[66] In the 1948 film Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the central characters, Brandon Shaw, is a firm believer in the master race ideology.
In the Harry Potter series, while the parallels were not originally intentional, there is much similarity between Lord Voldemort's "pureblood" ideology and the master race ideology of the Nazis, with wizards being "pure" and anyone with Muggle (non-wizard) blood being considered "half-blood" or "mudblood", a word used and treated the same way a racial slur would be in the real world (Neo-Nazis call non-white people mud people).
[69] In the film Lethal Weapon 2, the Master Race is a criminal organization of corrupt Afrikaner diplomatic officials from South Africa, led by South African consul-general in Los Angeles named Arjen Rudd that smuggles illegal gold krugerrands into the United States of America via Los Angeles Harbor.
