Nordicism
The belief that Nordic ancestry is superior to all others was originally embraced as "Anglo-Saxonism" in England and the United States, "Teutonicism" in Germany, and "Frankisism" in Northern France.
The Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (simply meaning "northern") as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined).
He defined nordique by referring to a set of physical characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a dolichocephalic skull.
Theodor Poesche proposed that the Aryans originated in the vast Rokitno, or Pinsk Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of Ukraine, but it was Karl Penka who popularised the idea that the Aryans had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of light hair and blue eyes.
[11] The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also referred in his writings to "blond beasts": lion-like amoral adventurers who were supposed to be the progenitors of creative cultures.
[12] In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he wrote, "In Latin malus ... could indicate the vulgar man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from the blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race.
"[13] However, Nietzsche thought of these "blond beasts" not as a racial type, but as the ideal aristocratic personality, which can appear in any society: "the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need.
Future president Calvin Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.
"[25] Grant argues that Nordics founded the United States and the English "language", and formed the ruling classes of ancient Greece and Rome.
This phrase, coined by the German eugenicists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, appeared in their 1921 work Human Heredity, which insisted on the innate superiority of the Nordic race.
According to the authors, the Nordic race arose in the ice age, from: quite a small group which, under stress of rapidly changing conditions (climate, beasts of the chase) was exposed to exceptionally rigorous selection and was persistently inbred, thus acquiring the peculiar characteristics which persist today as the exclusive heritage of the Nordic race ... Philological, archaeological and anthropological researches combine to indicate that the primal home of the Indo-Germanic [i.e. Aryan] languages must have been in Northern Europe.
[33][34][35][36] By this time, Germany was well-accustomed to theories of race and racial superiority due to the long-standing influence of the Völkisch movement, with its philosophy that Germans constituted a unique people, or Volk, linked by common blood.
While Volkism was popular mainly among Germany's lower classes and offered a romanticised version of ethnic nationalism, Nordicism attracted German anthropologists and eugenicists.
Hans F. K. Günther, one of Fischer's students, first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (1927).
[41] Nazi ideals were combined with a eugenics program that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of Untermenschen ("subhumans"): Jews, Slavs, and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.
[51] However, writing in April 1939, Rowbotham declared: "So after nearly a hundred years, the fantastic pessimistic philosophy of the brilliant French diplomat is seized upon and twisted to the use of a mystic demagogue who finds in the idea of the pure Aryan an excuse for thrusting civilization dangerously near back to the Dark Ages.
"[52]His racist ideology, through rooted in social and political concerns and though claiming to explain the nature of society itself, could not on his own terms effect any transformation.
[59] Adolf Hitler read Human Heredity shortly before he wrote Mein Kampf (published 1925–1926); he regarded it as scientific proof of the racial basis of civilisation.
[60] The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg also repeated Human Heredity's arguments in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).
Like Grant and others, Rosenberg argued that the entrepreneurial energy[citation needed] of the Nordics had "degenerated" when they mixed with "inferior" peoples.
[citation needed] Nazi legislation which identified the ethnic and "racial" affinities of the Jews reflected the populationist concept of race.
[67] By 1939, Hitler had abandoned Nordicist rhetoric in favor of the belief 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 World War II, when decisions were being made about the incorporation of conquered peoples into the Reich.
In 1942, Hitler made the following statement in private: I shall have no peace of mind until I have planted a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stands in need of regeneration.
[84] In July 1938, Mussolini declared that Italians had a strong Nordic heritage, particularly through the heritage of the Germanic Lombards who settled in the area of Italy after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and he also claimed that the intermixing of Mediterranean Romans with the Germanic Lombards was the last significant act of racial mixing that occurred in Italy, because no racial mixing had occurred since then.
The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History (1934) argued that the most dynamic civilisations have arisen from racially mixed cultures.
[93][failed verification] With the rise of Nazism many critics pointed to the flaws in the theory, repeating the arguments made by Sergi and others that the evidence of ancient Nordic achievement is thin when set against the civilizations of the Mediterranean and elsewhere.
The tripartite subdivision of "Caucasians" into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean groups persisted among some scientists into the 1960s, notably in Carleton Coon's book The Origin of Races (1962).
The development of the Kurgan theory of Indo-European origins challenged the Nordicist equation of Aryan and Nordic identity, since it placed the earliest Indo-European speakers around central Asia and/or far-eastern Europe (although according to the Kurgan hypothesis some Proto-Indo-Europeans did eventually migrate into Central and Northern Europe and become the ancestors of the Nordic peoples.)
The original German term used by Ripley, "Theodiscus", which is translated into English as Teutonic, has fallen out of favour amongst German-speaking scholars, and is restricted to a somewhat ironical usage similar to the archaic teutsch, if used at all.
