Racial policy of Nazi Germany

Nazi policies labeled centuries-long residents in German territory who were not ethnic Germans such as Jews (which in Nazi racial theory were emphasized as a Semitic people of Levantine origins), Romani (an Indo-Aryan people originating from the Indian subcontinent, historically colloquially referred to derogatorily as "Gypsies"), along with the vast majority of Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, etc.

), and most non-Europeans as inferior non-Aryan subhumans (under the Nazi appropriation of the term "Aryan") in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk ("master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community") at the top.

[5] Adolf Hitler himself along with other members of the Nazi Party in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) were greatly influenced by several 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers and proponents of philosophical, onto-epistemic, and theoretical perspectives on ecological anthropology, scientific racism, holistic science, and organicism regarding the constitution of complex systems and the theorization of organic-racial societies.

Nazi policy towards them changed during World War II as a pragmatic means to resolve military manpower shortages: they were allowed, with certain restrictions, to serve in the Waffen-SS, in spite of being considered subhumans.

[17] The Nazis originally sought to rid the German state of Jews and Romani by means of deportation (and later extermination), while black people were to be segregated and eventually eliminated through compulsory sterilization.

[23] Houston Stewart Chamberlain's work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900), one of the first to combine Social Darwinism with antisemitism, describes history as a struggle for survival between the Germanic peoples and the Jews, whom he characterized as an inferior and dangerous group.

It is notable that the proponents of this law, and the several thousand more that were to follow, most frequently explained them as necessary to prevent the infiltration of damaging, "alien-type" (Artfremd) hereditary traits into the German national or racial community (Volksgemeinschaft).

By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or been persuaded to sell out to the government, further reducing their rights as human beings; they were, in many ways, effectively separated from the German populace.

A precondition for such a tolerable relationship is the hope that the Jews and Jewish communities of Germany will be enabled to keep a moral and economic means of existence by the halting of defamation and boycott.

[47]The Nazi's had already barred Jews from having a role in Germany society as Lawyers, Civil Servants and Teachers with the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and led a systemic boycott of Jewish businesses (in addition to expulsion or exclusion from other professions, or the right to own stocks) before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were proposed but were looking for a means of codifying in a legal sense the exclusion of Jews (and other "non-Aryan" minorities) from both citizenship of the Reich, and therefore strip fundamental protections from the population.

[56] In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the Aryan race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.

[59][61] According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., "The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder.

Hitler believed 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.

On the other hand, Nazi propaganda targeting domestic audiences vigorously depicted the war against Soviet Union as a racial struggle of Aryans against "Jewish and Slavic untermenschen" to annihilate "Judeo-Bolsheivism".

[80] Reich Security Main Office (RSHM) proliferated conspiratorial, racist propaganda themes that identified "Jewishness with Bolshevism" and vilifiied Slavs as "untermenschen".

[84] Beginning in 1933, Nazi leadership 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, as 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.

Various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, also drew parallels between Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblance among these leaders.

[85] Following the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy redefined "Aryan" as someone who is "tribally" related to "German blood".

[90] However, in January 1936, Foreign Ministry wrote a memo to the Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy, writing that it was "essential that determination of whether the Turks are Aryan be decided as soon as possible", so that the Foreign Ministry could give "a satisfactory answer" to the Turkish Embassy's repeated questions about the issue, since there had been individual cases, that is, others in addition to Ruppert, in which "German citizens with Turkish mixed-blood had run into difficulties with the state and the [Nazi] Party due to their origins".

We emphatically point out to you and to your daughter the serious consequences of this behavior, one that obviously does not possess the slightest feeling for the honor of the Volk [nicht das geringste völkische Ehregefühl besitzt].

The colonial department in Berlin under Minister Alfred Rosenberg (born in Tallinn in 1893) looked on Estonians favorably as Finno-Ugrics and thus as "Aryans", Generalkommissar Karl-Siegmund Litzmann authorized a Landeseigene Verwaltung, or local national administration.

During this meeting, Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Hjalmar Schacht bestowed upon Kung an honorary doctorate degree, and attempted to open China's market to German exports.

[110] The most famous of these Nazi-trained Chinese officers was Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek, who studied military strategy and tactics at a Kriegsschule in Munich, and subsequently achieved the rank of lieutenant and served as an officer 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.

[118][119] Although of a separate and different evolutionary race, the Imperial Japanese were considered by Nazi ideologists such as Himmler as having sufficiently superior qualities as did German-Nordic blood to warrant an alliance.

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 daimyo 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.

Influential Nazi anti-Semite Johann von Leers favored excluding Japanese from the laws due both to the alleged Japanese-Aryan racial link and to improve diplomatic relations with Japan.

Decisions on some cases sometimes took years, with those affected unable to obtain jobs or interracially marry, primarily because the German government preferred as much as possible to avoid giving exemptions.

[121] Nazi policy stressed the superiority of the Nordic race, a sub-race of the white European population defined by the measurement of the size and proportions of the human body models of racial difference.

[70] Each group had different rights, food rations, allowed strips in the cities, separated residential areas, special schooling systems, public transportation and restricted restaurants.