Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies 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", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Nazi policies labeled centuries-long residents in German territory who were not ethnic Germans such as Jews (understood in Nazi racial theory 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.[1][2][3][4]
The racial policy of the Nazi Party and the German state was organized through the Office of Racial Policy, which published circulars and directives to relevant administrative organs, newspapers, and educational institutes.[5]
Historical origins of Nazi racial theories and policies[edit]
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.[6][7][8][9] In particular, one of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the 19th-century German nationalist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as an inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi Party members, and whose ideas were implemented among the philosophical and ideological foundations of Nazi-oriented Völkisch nationalism.[7]
Influences and inspirations from American racism[edit]
Nazi racial policies were in many ways directly influenced by the United States. The Nazis used "American Models" of racism to oppress and subjugate racial minorities as referenced by James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler's American Model and Professor at Yale University, who stated in his book "In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the American South had the appearance, in the words of two southern historians, of a "mirror image": these were two unapologetically racist regimes, unmatched in their pitilessness."[10] Jim Crow Era laws were a key inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, as the Nazis mirrored their form of racial oppression and segregation in the model of Jim Crow and segregation policy of the United States. However, the treatment of Native Americans was also an inspiration for Nazi ideology, similar to Jewish people; Native Americans had been integral to America.[11] They had been settled for thousands of years in the Americas (obviously, Germany as an entity has existed since 1871, but Jewish settlement in the lands of Central Europe has dated back over one thousand years at the very least.)[12] Nevertheless, the model of oppression and subjugation for both groups directly modeled what the Nazis implemented to oppress racial minorities that did not make up the Aryan composite. Banning from civil service, segregation, barring marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans, as well as the expulsion of Jewish people and other "undesirables" from government, military, and other essential positions,[13] were the most essential aspects of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and were directly modeled by what had been done to Black Americans during Jim Crow.[10] Arguably, the most influential of American policies can be seen in "Lebensraum," or an expansion of land exclusively for German Aryans, which saw the expulsion, murder, and enslavement of Jewish people, Slavic peoples, and other races deemed inferior. Manifest Destiny would directly influence this policy of forced removal and, in many ways, as the destruction of Native American livelihoods paved the way for Anglo American expansion and prosperity, so would the destruction of Slavic and Jewish livelihoods for the sake of Aryan expansion and prosperity.[14]
Iranians[edit]
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."[85] The Nazis advocated the common Aryan ancestry of Iranians and Germans. As a result, in 1936 the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from any restrictions to the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were "pure" Aryans. 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]
Nazi ideology was most common among Persian officials, elites, and intellectuals, but "even some members of non-Persian groups were eager to identify themselves with the Nazis" and a supposed Aryan race.[85] In 1934, the Nazis celebrated the Ferdowsi millennial celebration in Berlin, in which the Nazi government declared that the German and Persian people share membership in a common Indo-Germanic race. Hitler declared Iran to be an "Aryan country"; the changing of Persia's international name to Iran in 1935 was done by the Shah at the suggestion of the German ambassador to Iran as an act of "Aryan solidarity".[86] Also, Hitler personally promised that if he defeated the Soviet Union, he would return all of the Persian land taken by Russians during the Russo-Persian Wars. Even in 1939, Germany provided Iran with the so-called German Scientific Library. The library contained over 7,500 books selected "to convince Iranian readers... of the kinship between the National Socialist Reich and the Aryan culture of Iran".[87]
In 1936, the Nazi Office of Racial Politics, in response to a question from the German Foreign Ministry, classified non-Jewish Turks as Europeans, but "left unanswered the question of how to think about the obviously non-European Arabs, Persians, and Muslims."[88] Later that year, ahead of the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis responded to questions from the Egyptians by saying that the Nuremberg racial laws did not apply to them, and after the Iranian ambassador to Berlin "assured German officials that 'there was no doubt that the Iranian, as an Aryan,' was 'racially kindred (artverwandt) with the Germans," the German Foreign Ministry "assured the Iranian Embassy in Berlin that the correct distinction between was not between "Aryans and non-Aryans" but rather between "persons of German and related blood on one hand and Jews as well as racially alien on the other."[88] Iranians were classified as "pure-blooded Aryans" and thus were excluded from the Nuremberg Laws.[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".[89] Therefore, the official declaration by the Nazi state of Iranians being Aryans effectively rendered them as being "of kindred blood" to the Germans.
Turks and Turkics[edit]
Turks[edit]
In 1935, a half-Turkish half-German man named "Johannes Ruppert" was forced to leave the Hitler Youth, due to the belief that as the son of a Turkish man he was not a full Aryan as required by the Reich Citizenship Law.[90] Ruppert sought assistance from the Turkish Embassy in Berlin to clarify how “the Aryan question” affected his case. The Turkish Embassy brought the matter to the attention of the German Foreign Ministry. In a note of December 20, 1935, a Foreign Ministry official wrote that "opening up the Aryan question in relation to Turkey is extraordinarily undesirable as well as dangerous for our relations with Turkey".[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".[90] The classification of Turks as "non-Aryans", in keeping with Nazi racial theories, led to foreign policy complications, because the Nazis considered the Turkish government as a potential ally. Consequently, the racial theories had to be "modified" to some degree in accordance with foreign policy requirements.[91] In April 30, 1936 Nazi Office for Racial Policy released a circular which stated that the Turks were "Europeans" while explaining that Turkish citizens of Jewish background would still be considered Jews and Turks of "colored origin" would be considered non-European.[92][90] Some Turkish and international newspapers, such as the Swiss Le Temps and the Turkish Republique, reported at the time that the Turks had been recognized as an "Aryan nation" and that they were exempt from the Nuremberg laws.[93][94] Turkish newspaper Akşam published an article with the headline "The Turks are Aryans!".[95] Such reports were picked up by other international newspapers, as well as by some modern scholarship, however the claim that that the Turks had been recognized as an "Aryan nation" and that they were exempt from the Nuremberg laws was a hoax.[93][94] Nazi officials themselves disputed these reports by publishing a press release which stated that they were unfounded.[94] The Nazis classified Turks as "European" and not as "Aryans" and the decision had no practical consequences.[93] In addition, this decision was designed to appease Turkey from a foreign policy standpoint, although, from a racial standpoint, Nazi officials did not believe that the Turks were neither European nor Aryan.[90]
In May 1942, a writer in the official journal of the Nazi Office for Racial Policy, Neues Volk, replied to a father's question caused by his daughter's relationship with a Turkish man, about whether racial differences between Germans and Turks meant that a marriage should not take place.[90][96] The reply read:[90]
Norwegians[edit]
In Norway, the Nazis favored and promoted children between Germans and Norwegians, in an attempt to raise the birth rate of Nordic Aryans. 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).[100][101]