Untermensch
[4] Jewish, Slavic, and Romani people, along with the physically and mentally disabled, as well as homosexuals and political dissidents, and on rare instances, POWs from Western Allied armies, were considered untermenschen who were to be exterminated[5] in the Holocaust.
[6][7] According to the Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population of East-Central Europe was to be reduced in part through mass murder in the Holocaust for Lebensraum, with a significant amount expelled further east to Siberia and used as forced labour in the Reich.
[8] The term "under man" was used by the American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.
The Nazi Party later used the term in propaganda, possibly influenced in part from the title of the book's German edition Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).
[9] Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and roots almost at will in order to create new words, this development can be considered logical.
In the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization", published in 1936, Himmler wrote: We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.
[22] Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa, it is around 50 pages long and consists, for the most part, of photos portraying the natives of Eastern Europe in an extremely negative way.
Once the war was won by the rebel side, Francoism, similar to Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of creating a the new man,[26][31] which led to the brutal repression of the Spanish population.
"When faced with increasing military manpower shortages, the Nazi regime used soldiers from some Slavic countries, firstly from the Reich's allies Croatia and Slovakia[34] as well as within occupied territories.
[35] The concept of the Slavs in particular being Untermenschen served the Nazis' political goals; it was used to justify their expansionist policy and especially their aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union in order to achieve Lebensraum, particularly in Ukraine.
Early plans of the Nazi officials (summarized as Generalplan Ost) envisioned the ethnic cleansing and extermination of no fewer than 50 million people, who were not considered fit for Germanization, from territories it wanted to conquer in Europe.
Nazi anti-Slavism was also tied to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory; which claimed that Slavs were inferior people controlled by Jews as pawns in their plots against Aryans.
[37] Prior to the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht's High Command began issuing orders to enable German soldiers to indiscriminately target the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and unleash systematic violence against entire populations.
German Army was instructed to grant carte blanche to the anti-Jewish massacres carried out by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in German-occupied territories.
[44] Historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes that for the Nazis, "it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch, which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of Judeo-Bolshevism.
[3][51] In order to forge a strategic alliance with the Independent State of Croatia – a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Nazis deviated from a strict interpretation of their racial ideology, and Croats were officially described as "more Germanic than Slav", a notion supported by Croatia's fascist (Ustashe) dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained that the "Croats were descendants of the ancient Goths" and "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial".
That policy of euthanasia started officially on 1 September 1939 when Hitler signed an edict to the effect, and carbon monoxide was first used to murder disabled patients.
[56][57]Biology classes in Nazi-era Germany schools taught about differences between the race of Nordic German "Übermenschen" and "ignoble" Jewish and Slavic "subhumans".
