Racial policy of Nazi Germany

Further information: Nazi racial theories

Eva Justin of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit measuring the skull of a Romani woman.

The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of orders and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race". Nazi eugenics aimed for "racial hygiene" through compulsory sterilization of people they viewed as subhuman (Untermenschen). This policy culminated in the Holocaust.

Under the Nazi appropriation of the term "Aryan", a racial hierarchy was erected with an Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk) at the top. Centuries-long residents of German territories were marked as inferior, including Jews, Romani people, and the vast majority of Slavs.

The Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy organized the program and extensively published circulars and directives to relevant administrative organs, newspapers, and educational institutes. The major legislation that enacted Nazi racial policy was known as the Nuremberg Laws.

Aryan Master Race

Main article: Nazi racial theories

Bruno Beger conducting anthropometric studies in Sikkim.

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T4 Euthanasia Program: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too." from the Office of Racial Policy's Neues Volk.

Theorists in the Völkisch movement believed that Germany's Teutonic ancestors spread throughout Europe. Germanic tribes like the Burgundians, Franks, and Western Goths joined with the Gauls to make France. The Lombards moved south and joined with Italians; the Jutes made Denmark; the Angles and Saxons made England; the Flemings made Belgium; and other tribes made the Netherlands. Precursors to Nazi racial beliefs can be found in works of writers like Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans F. K. Günther.

Nazi racial theory placed human beings on a scale from pure Aryan to non-Aryan Untermensch (subhuman). Their idea of an Aryan master race included Germanic peoples and other Northern Europeans like Scandinavians, Dutch, and English people. Italic peoples were inferior but tolerated, and French people were considered suitably Germanic.

At the bottom of the racial scale were Jews, Polish people, Serbs and other Slavs, Romani people, and black people. The Nazis originally sought to rid the German state of Jews and Romani by means of deportation, while black people were to be segregated and eliminated through compulsory sterilization.

The Nazis considered Slavs Non-Aryans who were to be expelled, enslaved, or exterminated through the secret Generalplan Ost ("Master Plan East"). Their propaganda suggested any Asiatic Slavs were the results of intermingling with Mongolians and that they were dominated by Jews and Bolsheviks.

When the Nazi Party gained power in 1933, they passed the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage which offered a government loan to all newly married Aryan couples. After the birth of each child, a portion of the loan would be forgiven. The goal was to increase birthrates for the racially elite.

The Nazis also quickly established a eugenics mechanism by passing the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in July 1933. Compulsory sterilization could be forced by the Hereditary Health Court for anyone suffering from an intellectual disability, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, blindness, deafness, "any severe hereditary deformity", and even alcoholism. The law also enforced sterilization of the "Rhineland bastards", children of German and African parentage. Between 1933 and 1945, 3-400,000 people were sterilized under the law. The policy soon accelerated from sterilization into euthanasia in programs like Aktion T4.

American influence

In a 1928 speech about the goals of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler admired the way white men in North America decimated indigenous people through violence and subterfuge. Once in power, the Nazis looked to America as a classic example of a country with racist laws. Historians sometimes dismissed the idea that racist policies like American Jim Crow laws provided a template for Nazi legislation, but the influence was always evident.

A Nazi memo from 1933 authored by a team led by Roland Freisler working under Hanns Kerrl pointed to North American race laws as emblematic of Nazi goals. The memo summarized the Völkisch thesis, "The fundamental principle of the egoistic age of the past, that everyone who bears a human countenance is equal, destroys the race and therewith the life force of the Volk. It is therefore the task of the National Socialist state to check the race-mixing that has been underway in Germany over the course of the centuries". As models for this racist program, the memo pointed to medieval expulsions of Jews from European countries as well as Jim Crow laws in the American south. The Nazis adapted the mechanisms of Jim Crow laws into the Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped Jews of German citizenship.

Jewish racial policies

Public reading of Julius Streicher's antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Worms, Germany, 1935.

In 1933, approximately 525,000 Jews were living in Germany, 0.75% of the population. Discrimination against Jews began immediately after the national seizure of power in 1933. The first stumbling block towards making persecution of the Jews an active Nazi policy was defining them. Lawyer Bernhard Lösener described the debate as total chaos. Germans of mixed descent (Mischling) were especially problematic for the party. Various percentages of Jewish heritage were argued as definitive. Politician Achim Gercke felt 1⁄16 Jewish ancestry should be the legal threshold. There was no clear definition when the first antisemitic law was promulgated. The Nazis finally defined a Jew as a person with three or four Jewish grandparents. One or two Jewish grandparents was considered mixed.

On April 1, 1933, a Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was observed throughout Germany. Only six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned Jews from serving in the public sector. Such laws were defended as necessary to prevent the infiltration of damaging, "alien-type" (Artfremd) hereditary traits into the German national or racial community (Volksgemeinschaft). The legislation was aimed at reserving privileged positions for Aryan Germans. The exclusion of Jews continued apace, with each new law cementing their status as second-class citizens.

On August 25, 1933, the Nazis signed the Haavara Agreement with Zionists to allow German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for a portion of their economic assets. The agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Nazi Germany. Most Jews fled to Western Europe. By 1939, 60,000 German Jews had emigrated to Palestine.

Nuremberg Laws

Main article: Nuremberg Laws

1935 Chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the Nuremberg Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws introduced in Nazi Germany on September 15, 1935 at a special session of the Reichstag during the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally. The legislation comprised two measures concerning procreation and citizenship. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45. Such partnerships were considered racial pollution (Rassenschande), and the prohibition was soon expanded to Gypsies and Black people.

The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to people of "German or related blood", reducing others to state subjects without full rights. The laws were a means of codifying the exclusion of Jews and other "non-Aryan" minorities from citizenship in the Reich, which stripped them of fundamental protections.

The Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Representation of the German Jews) called the Nuremberg Laws "the heaviest of blows for the Jews in Germany". They asked for recognition of their autonomy over Jews in Germany. They also stressed the importance of continuing Jewish education traditions, particularly in preparation for emigration to Palestine with a focus on manual labor, Hebrew studies, and vocational training of girls.

The Holocaust

Main article: The Holocaust

Nazi policy evolved into one of total extermination, culminating in the Holocaust. The official public policy from 1933–40 was expulsion of Jews from Germany. Beginning in 1940, the Nazi policy became a secret as it shifted towards annihilation of Jews. The Nazis internally referred to this policy as the "Final Solution", and they revealed it to non-Nazi government officials at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference. Around six million Jews from Nazi-occupied territory were killed.

Sinti and Roma

Main article: Romani Holocaust

The Nazis considered roughly 10% of Gypsies to be Aryan. Their persecution of the Romani people began in 1936 with internment. Eventually, 23,000 Gypsies were sent to concentration camps.

Heinrich Himmler suggested creating a "Gypsy Law" to separate Gypsies from the German people and prevent "intermingling of blood". Despite being widely discussed, a specific "Gypsy Law" was never enacted by the Nazis.

Afro-Germans

Main article: Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany

A biracial Rhinelander who was classified as "hereditarily unfit" under the Nazi regime.

The Black population of Germany in 1933 was fairly small, numbering perhaps as many as 25,000 people. There was no systemic annihilation plan for Black people in Germany, but many were imprisoned, sterilized, and killed. Black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazis banned jazz as "Negermusik".

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler moaned that France was becoming more "negrified". He saw French marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the Aryan race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe". He believed Jews brought Black men to the Rhineland in order to subjugate the "white race" through interbreeding.

The Nazis referred to biracial children of Senegalese soldiers stationed in French territory as "Rhineland Bastards". They sterilized 400 of these children in 1938. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program in the Rhineland. African-Germans paradoxically had a better chance of surviving the war than the average German, because they were typically excluded from military service.

Poles, Russians, and other Slavs

See also: Nazi crimes against the Polish nation, German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, Generalplan Ost, and Germanization

Mass expulsion of Poles in 1939 as part of the German ethnic cleansing of western Poland annexed to the Reich.

Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that the German need for Lebensraum ("living space") required eastwards expansion (Drang nach Osten) into Russia and her vassal states.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler expressed his future plans for the Slavs, "As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them as we see fit, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitants and civilising them, goes straight off into a concentration camp!"

Generalplan Ost envisaged removal of the majority of the population of conquered counties, with very small and varied percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanisation, expulsion into the depths of Russia, or other fates. Himmler declared no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind to mingle with any "alien races". The Wehrbauer ("soldier-peasants") would settle in a fortified line to prevent civilization arising beyond German borders.

The Nazis issued Polish decrees on March 8, 1940 which regulated the working and living conditions of Polish laborers (Zivilarbeiter) in Germany. All Poles had to wear a purple "P" badge, and any Pole who had sexual or improper relations with a German would be executed. The Gestapo pursued every case relentlessly. Hundreds of Polish and Russian men were executed for their relations with German women. The Nazis also kidnapped Polish children with Nordic racial characteristics. Those classified as "racially valuable" were to be adopted and raised as Germans, while those who failed the tests would be used in slave labor or murdered in medical experiments. The Nazis considered people living in the Goralenvolk area of Poland to be descended from ethnic Germans and sufficiently Aryan.

The General Government in occupied Poland divided the population into different groups. Each group had different rights, food rations, allowed strips in the cities, separated residential areas, special schooling systems, public transportation and restricted restaurants. Later adapted in all Nazi-occupied countries by 1942, this Germanization program used the racial caste system of reserving certain rights to one group and barred privileges to another. Ethnic Poles were believed by Hitler to be "biologically inferior race" that could never be educated or elevated through Germanization. In 1940, Hitler approved of a plan regarding the Germanization of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, he estimated around half of the Czech population were suitable for Germanization but made clear that the "mongoloid" types and Czech intelligentsia were not allowed to be Germanized.

To other countries, Germany publicized their 1941 invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, as "a crusade against Bolshevism". Within the country, the 1941 invasion of Russia was described as a racial struggle of Aryans against "Jewish and Slavic untermenschen" to annihilate "Judeo-Bolsheivism". As World War II ground on, manpower shortages prompted Nazis to allow Slavs to serve in the Waffen-SS with certain restrictions.

The Nazis also supressed the Slavic culture and language of Sorbs living in Saxony and Brandenburg. Tens of thousands were imprisoned and became lesser-known victims of Nazi racial laws.

Iranians

Nazi leadership tried to increase their influence in Iran by financing a racist journal Iran-e Bastan, co-edited by a pro-Nazi Iranian Abdulrahman Saif Azad. Some Iranians admired the way such chauvinistic highlighted their pre-Islamic past. The Nazis felt Iranians shared ancestry with Aryans. In 1936 the Reich Cabinet exempted Iranians from any restrictions under the Nuremberg Laws. In 1939, Germany provided Iran with a library of over 7,500 books to demonstrate the kinship between their cultures.

Turkey

Nazi policy towards Turks was muddled. Germany hoped to retain Turkey as an ally, even as the Nazis viewed Turks as inferior.

On April 30, 1936, Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy pronounced Turks as Europeans. However, Jewish Turks and Turks of "colored origin" were deemed non-European. A misconception arose that the Turks were given Aryan status.

Crimean Karaites

The Crimean Karaites, Turkic speakers following Karaite Judaism, managed to get a declaration from the Reich Agency for the Investigation of Families that they were not to be considered of Jewish religion and their racial classification should be done individually. A few Karaites were murdered by German troops in Russia who were unaware of the declaration. Most Karaites fared much better than Turkic Krymchaks.

Norway

During the German occupation of Norway, Nazis encouraged Germans to have children with Norwegians. Around 10,000–12,000 war children (Krigsbarn) were born from these unions during the war. Some of them were separated from their mothers and cared for in so-called "Lebensborn" clinics ("Fountain of Life" clinics).

Finland & the Baltics

Main article: Continuation War

The Finns were considered a part of the "Eastern Mongol race" with the Sámi people in Nazi racial hierarchies. Yet when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Finland resumed hostilities with the USSR in what became known as the Continuation War. Owing to Finland's substantial military contribution on the Eastern Front of World War II, Hitler announced the Finns should be considered Nordic. He hoped the Finns would cover one of Germany's flanks while Turkey covered the other.

In 1941 Nazi Germany established the Reichskommissariat Ostland to administer the conquered territories of the Baltic region. Estonians were favorably seen as Aryan "Finno-Ugrics".

Chinese and Japanese

Chinese ambassador Hsiang-hsi Kung traveled to Nazi Germany in 1937 and was warmly received by Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht.

Adolf Hitler meeting with Empire of Japan ambassador Hiroshi Ōshima

Wang Jingwei of the Wang Jingwei Government, a rival Chinese state that was formed by the Empire of Japan as a puppet government to oppose the Nationalist regime under President Chiang Kai-shek, meeting with German diplomats in 1941

Chinese Wehrmacht soldier Chiang Wei-kuo in Nazi Germany with high ranking Wehrmacht military officers, prior to 1939.

President Wang Jingwei at a military parade with his Chinese soldiers wearing Stahlhelms using Chinese military insigna and rank while carrying German rifles

Chiang Wei-kuo, a Chinese officer candidate in the Wehrmacht. The shoulder boards indicate the German military rank of Fahnenjunker (cadet), c. 1937

Despite having a separate evolutionary origin from the Europeans, the Chinese and Japanese were both considered by Hitler and the government of Nazi Germany to be "Aryans of the East" and the "Herrenvolk of the Orient" (i.e. the "Master race of the Orient").

In 1945, Adolf Hitler said:

"Pride in one's own race, and that does not imply contempt for other races, is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them."
"Mir erscheint es nur normal, daß jeder seinen Rassenstolz besitzt, und das heißt noch lange nicht, daß er die anderen mißachtet. Ich war nie der Meinung, daß etwa Chinesen oder Japaner rassisch minderwertig wären. Beide gehören alten Kulturen an, und ich gebe offen zu, daß ihre Tradition der unsrigen überlegen ist. Sie haben allen Grund, darauf stolz zu sein, genau wie wir stolz sind auf den Kulturkreis, dem wir angehören. Ich glaube sogar, daß es mir um so leichter fallen wird, mich mit den Chinesen und den Japanern zu verständigen, je mehr sie auf ihrem Rassenstolz beharren."
—Adolf Hitler, "Bormann dictations" ("Bormann-Diktate"), 13 February 1945

Due to Nazi Germany's recognition of Chinese and Japanese as "Aryans of the East" Hitler had allowed Chinese and Japanese soldiers to study in Nazi German military academies and serve in the Nazi German Wehrmacht as part of their combat training. Since 1926, Germany had supported the Republic of China militarily and industrially. Germany had also sent advisers such as Alexander von Falkenhausen and Hans von Seeckt to assist the Chinese, most notably in the Chinese Civil War and China's anti-communist campaigns. Max Bauer was sent to China and served as one of Chiang Kai-shek's advisers. Around this time, Hsiang-hsi Kung, the Republic of China Minister of Finance, visited Nazi Germany and was warmly welcomed by Hitler on June 13, 1937. 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. In order to attract more Chinese students to study in Germany, Hitler, Göring, and Schacht earmarked for 100,000 reichsmarks for Chinese students studying in the universities and military academies of Nazi Germany after they persuaded a German industrialist to set aside the money for that purpose. Moreover, Kung, in favor of commercial credits, politely refused a generous international loan offer by Adolf Hitler. The most famous of these Chinese Nazi soldiers 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 a Nazi soldier 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.

Hitler had supported the Empire of Japan as early as 1904, when during the Russo-Japanese War it had defeated the Russians, which he considered a defeat for Austro-Slavism. He made a number of other statements expressing his respect and admiration for the Japanese in his book Mein Kampf.

Although of a separate and different evolutionary race, the Chinese and 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 in Agartha."

Karl Haushofer, a German general, geographer, and geopolitician, whose ideas may have influenced the development of Hitler's expansionist strategies, saw Japan as the brother nation to Germany. In 1908, he was sent by the German Army "to Tokyo to study the Japanese Army and to advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life and marked the beginning of his love affair with the orient. During the next four years he traveled extensively in East Asia, adding Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin to his repertoire of Russian, French, and English languages. Karl Haushofer had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and during his stay in the Far East he was introduced to Oriental esoteric teachings." It was based on such teachings that he came to make similar bestowals of his own upon the Japanese people, calling them the "Aryans of the East", and even the "Herrenvolk of the Orient" (i.e. the "Master race of the Orient").

Initially, the Japanese were still subject to Germany's racial laws, which – with the exception of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that specifically mentioned Jews – generally applied to all "non-Aryans". However, since Japanese and Chinese were given "Aryans of the East" status, these racial laws were applied to them in a lenient manner as compared to other "non-Aryans" who were not granted "Aryan" status by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi German government began enacting the laws after taking power in 1933, and the Japanese government initially protested several racial incidents involving Japanese or Japanese-Germans that year which were then resolved by the Nazi high command by treating their Japanese allies leniently in these disputes. Especially after the collapse of Sino-German cooperation and Chinese declaration of war on Germany, Chinese nationals faced persecution in Germany. 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. The Foreign Ministry agreed with von Leers and sought several times between 1934 and 1937 to change the laws, but other government agencies, including the Racial Policy Office, opposed the change.

Then in October 1933, German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath issued an exemption to Chinese and Japanese from the racial laws. Additionally, in April 1935 another Nazi decree stated that racial discrimination cases involving Aryans of the East (aka. Chinese and Japanese) that might jeopardize German diplomatic relations—i.e., Japanese—would be dealt with individually. 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. The German government often exempted more German-Japanese than it preferred in order to avoid a repeat of the 1933 controversies, and in 1934 it prohibited the German press from discussing the race laws when Japanese and Chinese were involved to avoid any diplomatic problems with China or Japan.

See also

• Ahnenerbe
• Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany
• Anti-Romani sentiment
• Romani Holocaust
• Antisemitism
• Antisemitism in Europe
• Antisemitism in 21st-century Germany
• Anti-Slavic sentiment
• Aryan certificate
• Aryan paragraph
• Aryanization
• Badge of shame
• Consequences of Nazism
• Eugenics
• Greater Germanic Reich
• Honorary Aryan
• Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
• Kaiser Wilhelm Society
• National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise
• Master race
• Nazi eugenics
• Nazi racial theories
• Nordicism
• Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy
• Racial hierarchy
• Racial discrimination
• Racial segregation
• Racism
• Racism in Europe
• Racism in Germany
• White nationalism
• White supremacy
• Yellow badge
• Renordification

Further reading

• Aly, Götz, Susanne Heim. Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002.
• Bauer, Yehuda. A History Of The Holocaust, New York: F. Watts, 1982.
• Black, Peter, and Martin Gutmann. "Racial theory and realities of conquest in the occupied east: The Nazi leadership and non-German nationals in the SS and police". In The Waffen-SS: A European History. Oxford, 2016.
• Browning, Christopher. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
• Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York : HarperCollins, 1997.
• Hiro, Dilip. Iran Under the Ayatollahs. Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc, 1987.
• König, Malte. "Racism within the Axis: Sexual Intercourse and Marriage Plans between Italians and Germans, 1940–3", Journal of Contemporary History 54.3. July, 2019. 508–526.
• Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: conformity, opposition and racism in everyday life London: Batsford, 1987.
• Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• Schafft, Gretchen E. From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
• Weindling, Paul. Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

External links

• Nazi Racial Laws in English translation
• Nazi Racial Laws in the German original
• "Images of a 1938 German "J" Jewish passport from www.passportland.com". Archived from the original on 2011-04-02. Retrieved 2019-04-22.