Racial policy of Nazi Germany



The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race", and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy. It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by using compulsory sterilizations and extermination of the Untermensch (or "sub-humans"), and which eventually culminated in the Holocaust. These policies targeted peoples, in particular Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped people, who were labeled as "inferior" in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk (or "master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft (or "national community") at the top, and ranked Slavs, Romani, persons of color and Jews at the bottom.

Hitler and the origin of racial policy ideas
Scientific racism became popular at the end of the 19th century in Europe, and had a direct influence on the pan-Germanism movement, including the Alldeutscher Verband (Pangermanic League). Adolf Hitler, who lived as a youth in Vienna, Austria, administrated until 1910 by the anti-semitic mayor Karl Lueger, admired the latter and was exposed to anti-Semitic and racially charged books and literature. He developed these concepts in Mein Kampf (1925). He concluded that the Northern European people belonged to the "Aryan race", believed to be superior to all other ethnic groups and races. This belief system, fundamental to the Nazi ideology, held that "Aryans" had been responsible for all advances in civilization and morality in world history, and that Jews wanted to destroy it. Hitler also theorized the Lebensraum space, claiming that Eastern Europe should be submitted to the Reich in order to give "living space" for the expansion of the "Aryan race." This would be implemented during the war under the name of the Generalplan Ost.

Racial policies regarding the Jews between 1933 to 1940
Between 1933 and 1934, Nazi policy was fairly moderate, not wishing to scare off voters or moderately minded politicians (although the eugenics program was established as early as July 1933). On 25 August 1933, the Nazis even signed the Haavara Agreement with Zionists to allow German Jews to emigrate to Palestine--by 1939, 60,000 German Jews had emigrated there. The Nazi Party used populist anti-semitic views to gain votes. Using the “stab-in-the-back legend”, they blamed poverty, the Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and the loss of World War I by the "November Criminals" all on the Jews and the left-wing. German woes were attributed to the effects of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1933, persecution of the Jews became active Nazi policy. It only became worse with the years, culminating in the Holocaust, or so-called “Final Solution”, which was decided by Hitler during World War II and made official at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference.

On April 1, 1933, the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was observed throughout Germany. Only six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, banning Jews from government jobs. 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). These laws meant that Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from privileged and superior positions reserved for “Aryan Germans”. From then on, Jews were forced to work at more menial positions, becoming second-class citizens or to the point they were "illegally residing" in Nazi Germany.

The Nuremberg Laws


Between 1935 and 1936 persecution of the Jews increased apace while the process of "Gleichschaltung" (lit.: "standardisation", the process by which the Nazis achieved complete control over German society) was implemented. In May 1935, Jews were forbidden to join the Wehrmacht (the army), and in the summer of the same year, anti-semitic propaganda appeared in shops and restaurants. The Nuremberg Laws were passed around the time of the great Nazi rallies at Nuremberg; on September 15, 1935 the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor" was passed, preventing marriage between any Jew and non - Jews. At the same time, the "Reich Citizenship Law" was passed and was reinforced in November by a decree, stating that all Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their own country (their official title became "subjects of the state"). This meant that they were deprived of basic citizens' rights, e.g., the right to vote. This removal of citizens' rights was instrumental in the process of anti-semitic persecution: the process of denaturalization allowed the Nazis to exclude, de jure, Jewish people from the “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”), thus granting judicial legitimacy to their persecution and opening the way to harsher laws and, eventually, extermination of the Jews. Philosopher Hannah Arendt had pointed out this important judicial aspect of the Holocaust in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), where she demonstrated that to violate human rights, Nazi Germany first deprived human beings of their citizenship. Arendt underlined that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, citizens’ rights actually preceded human rights, as the latter needed the protection of a determinate state to be actually respected.

The drafting of the Nuremberg Laws has often been attributed to Hans Globke. Globke had studied British attempts to 'order' its empire by creating hierarchical social orders, for example in the organization of “martial races” in India.

In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them from having any influence in education, politics, higher education, and industry. There was now nothing to stop the anti-Jewish actions that spread across the German economy.

Between 1937 and 1938, new laws were implemented, and the segregation of Jews from the “German Aryan” population was completed. In particular, Jews were punished financially for being Jewish.

On March 1, 1938, government contracts could not be awarded to Jewish businesses. On September 30 of the same year, "Aryan" doctors could only treat "Aryan" patients. Provision of medical care to Jews was already hampered by the fact that Jews were banned from being doctors.

On August 17, Jews had to add "Israel"(males) or "Sara" (females) to their names, and a large letter "J" was to be printed on their passports on October 5. On November 15, Jewish children were banned from going to state-run schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had 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.

The increasingly totalitarian regime that Hitler imposed on Germany allowed him to control the actions of the SS and the army. On November 7, 1938, a young Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan attacked and shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the Nazi-German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan's family, together with more than 12,000 Polish-born Jews, had been expelled by the Nazi government from Germany to Poland during the so-called “Polenaktion” on October 28, 1938. Joseph Goebbels ordered retaliation. On the night of November 9 the SS conducted the Night of Broken Glass ("Kristallnacht"), in which the storefronts of Jewish shops and offices were smashed and vandalized. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 20,000 sent to concentration camps. Collectively, the Jews were made to pay back one billion RM in damages; the fine was collected by confiscating 20% of every Jew's property.

Jewish responses to the Nuremberg Laws
After the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Representation of the German Jews) announced the following:

The Laws decided upon by the Reichstag in Nuremberg have come as the heaviest of blows for the Jews in Germany. But they must create a basis on which a tolerable relationship becomes possible between the German and the Jewish people. The "Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden" is willing to contribute to this end with all its powers. 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.

The organization of the life of the Jews in Germany requires governmental recognition of an autonomous Jewish leadership. The Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland is the agency competent to undertake this.

The most urgent tasks for the "Reichsvertretung", which it will press energetically and with full commitment, following the avenues it has previously taken, are:

Our own Jewish educational system must serve to prepare the youth to be upright Jews, secure in their faith, who will draw the strength to face the onerous demands which life will make on them from conscious solidarity with the Jewish community, from work for the Jewish present and faith in the Jewish future. In addition to transmitting knowledge, the Jewish schools must also serve in the systematic preparation for future occupations. With regard to preparation for emigration, particularly to Palestine, emphasis will be placed on guidance toward manual work and the study of the Hebrew language. The education and vocational training of girls must be directed to preparing them to carry out their responsibilities as upholders of the family and mothers of the next generation.

Other "non-Aryans"
Though the laws were primarily directed against Jews, other "non-Aryan" people were subject to the laws, and to other legislation concerned with racial hygiene. The definition of "Aryan" was imprecise and ambiguous, but was clarified over time in a number of judicial and executive decisions. Jews were by definition non-Aryan, because of their Semitic origins, but most European peoples were automatically included under the definition of Aryan as "Indo-European". The fact that Aryan is essentially a linguistic rather than a racial category led to some difficulty reconciling Nazi-supported racial typologies with the Aryan concept. There was some dispute about the position of the Roma, who were Indo-European in origin, speaking an Indo-Aryan language. Non-Indo-European Africans and Asians were automatically excluded, though Nazi views regarding the East Asian cultures, such as the Japanese, Chinese and Tibetan peoples strayed from that belief significantly. In Africa, only the Berbers from North Africa, particularly the Kabyles, were classified as Aryans. The Nazis portrayed Swedes, the Afrikaaners who are white European descendants of Dutch-speaking Boers in South Africa and higher-degree Northern/Western Europeans of South America (mainly from Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina) as ideal "Aryans" along with the German-speaking peoples of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (the country was neutral during the war). In Asia, only the Indo-Aryan population of Iran and India were considered Aryan.

The July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, written by Ernst Rüdin and other theorists of "racial hygiene," established "Genetic Health Courts" which decided on compulsory sterilization of "any person suffering from a hereditary disease." These included, for the Nazis, those suffering from "Congenital Mental Deficiency", schizophrenia, "Manic-Depressive Insanity", "Hereditary Epilepsy", "Hereditary Chorea" (Huntington’s), Hereditary Blindness, Hereditary Deafness, "any severe hereditary deformity", as well as "any person suffering from severe alcoholism". Further modifications of the law enforced sterilization of the "Rhineland bastards" (children of mixed German and African parentage).

After the Night of the Long Knives of June 30 to July 2, 1934, during which the SS and Gestapo purged the “too revolutionary” leadership of the SA, the SS emerged as the dominant police power in Germany. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler eager to please Hitler, and hungry for greater power, willingly obeyed his orders. The SS swore a personal oath to Hitler and as his personal bodyguard units, they were more obedient and loyal to Hitler than the SA. They were also supported by the Heer (German Army), which was more willing to comply with Hitler's decisions after he announced the SA would act as an auxiliary to the army, and not the other way around as the SA leadership had wanted.

On August 2, 1934, President Paul von Hindenburg died. No new President was selected; instead the powers of the Chancellor and President were combined. This change, and a tame government with no opposition parties, allowed Hitler full control of law-making. The army also swore an oath of loyalty personally to the “Führer” (“Leader”), giving Hitler complete power over the army. The Nazi ideologues would theorize the “Führerprinzip”, which granted preeminence to Hitler’s direct control over the government .

German Mulattoes
Of particular concern to the Nazi scientist Eugen Fischer were the "Rhineland Bastards": mixed-race offspring of Senegalese soldiers who had been stationed in the Rhineland as part of the French army of occupation. He believed that these people should be sterilized in order to protect the racial purity of the German population. At least 400 mixed-race children were forcibly sterilized in the Rhineland by 1938. This order only applied in the Rhineland. Other African Germans were unaffected. Despite this policy there was never any systematic attempt to eliminate the (very small) black population in Germany, though mixed marriage and interracial sex was illegal. According to Susan Samples the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program in the Rhineland. Hans Massaquoi describes his experience as a half-African in Hamburg, unaware of the Rhineland sterilizations until long after the war. . Samples also points to the paradoxical fact that African-Germans actually had a better chance of surviving the war than the average German. They were excluded from military activity because of their non-Aryan status, but were not considered a threat and so were unlikely to be incarcerated. Samples and Massaquoi also note that African-Germans were not subjected to the segregation they would have experienced in the United States, nor excluded from facilities such as expensive hotels. However, both she and Massaquoi state that downed black American pilots were more likely to become victims of violence and murder from German citizens than were white pilots.

Other groups
About 10,000 Japanese nationals (mostly diplomats and military officials) residing in Germany were given "Honorary Aryan" citizenship with more privileges than any other "non-Aryan" ethnonational group. In Norway, the Nazis favored marriages between Germans and Norwegians, in an attempt to spawn a new “Aryan” generation of Nordics. Around 10,000 to 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).

Policies regarding Slavs
Nazi ideology viewed Slavs as a racially inferior group, suitable for enslavement, or even extermination. Generalplan Ost (GPO) was a Nazi plan to realize Hitler's "new order of ethnographical relations" in the territories occupied by Germany in Eastern Europe during World War II. It was prepared in 1941 and confirmed in 1942. The plan was part of Hitler's own Lebensraum plan and a fulfillment of the Drang nach Osten ("Drive towards the East") state ideology. The final version of Generalplan Ost, essentially a grand plan for ethnic cleansing, was divided into two parts; the Kleine Planung ("Small Plan"), which covered actions which were to be taken during the war, and the Grosse Planung ("Big Plan"), which covered actions to be undertaken after the war was won (to be carried into effect gradually over a period of 25–30 years). The Small Plan was to be put into practice as the Germans conquered the areas to the east of their pre-war borders. The individual stages of this plan would then be worked out in greater detail. In this way the plan for Poland was drawn up at the end of November, 1939. The plan envisaged differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanisation, expulsion into the depths of Russia, and other fates, the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would be Germanized.

Some German anthropologists had considered the Dinaric race of the Southern Slavs to be superior to all other European races except the Nordics. Prior to 1941, Serbs were viewed particularly favourably. Germans compared the unification of Yugoslavia to that of Germany in the late nineteenth century, considered Serbs as kindred peoples (as descendants of the Germanic Goths who dwelt in the Balkans in late Antiquity), they admired the accomplishments of Serbia's Medieval Emperor Dushan, and had often sympathized with their struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Such racial views aligned with the political climate prior to the outbreak of the war, given that, prior to the anti-Nazi uprising in Serbia, Yugoslav foreign policy was generally pro-German. Germany had favoured a Serb-led united Yugoslavia over Croat and Slovene separatist factions, given that a homogeneous Yugoslavia would be more easily responsive to German economic and political interests. However, following the Serb-led anti-Nazi coup d'état, German racial polity radically shifted and became anti-Serb. They now favoured the Croats, who were now viewed to be culturally superior and more akin to Germans, and in a back-flip from previous German support for a united Yugoslavia, Germany dismantled Yugoslavia after the invasion of 1941.

Civilian deaths totaled 15.9 million which included 1.5 million from military actions; 7.1 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals; 1.8 million deported to Germany for forced labour; and 5.5 million famine and disease deaths. Additional famine deaths which totaled 1 million during 1946-47 are not included here. The official Polish government report of war losses prepared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 war victims out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews; this report excluded ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian losses.

Germanization between 1939 and 1945
Nazi policy stressed the superiority of the Nordic race, a sub-section of the white European population defined by anthropometric models of racial difference. From 1940 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, the Germanization program used the racial caste system of reserving certain rights to one group and barred privileges to another. In addition with their predominant religion and ethnicity per individual of that ethnic group or nationality. Listed from the most privileged to the least:


 * Germans from Germany (Reichsdeutsche) - Nordic Germans are said most favorable, but all German citizens are in the top category.
 * Germans from outside, active ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), honorary "Aryans" from Axis powers, European countries in Volksliste category 1 and 2 (see Volksdeutsche and Deutschstämmige).
 * Germans from outside, passive Germans and members of families (Deutschstämmige), handicapped, political dissidents, common criminals in Volksliste category 3 and 4.
 * Other Germanic peoples closely related to Germans (Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Finland-Swedes, Estonian Swedes, Faroese, Flemings, Icelanders, English and the Dutch) but treated as categories 1 and 2 in most privileges, especially Nazi sympathizers. Until 1942, the Greeks were included in this category by virtue of their being descendants of the Ancient Greeks.
 * Italians (particularly from regions north of Rome, e.g. Tuscany, Lombardy, etc.), Spaniards and Portuguese were treated as category 1 and 2, especially pro-Nazi sympathizers (e.g. Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and Salazarist Portugal diplomats). Some Southern Italians were treated as least (Suspicion of miscegenation with African and Semitic peoples), but within the same category. The Greeks are included in this category after 1943, due to their strong anti-Nazi resistance movement.
 * Celtic/Gaelic peoples: Irish, Scottish and Welsh.
 * French people in France (except German speaking Alsatians, and pro-Nazi French supporters in categories 1 and 2).
 * Highlander Polish (Goralenvolk): an attempt to split the Polish nation by using local collaborators.
 * Hungarians, Estonians, and Finns (despite their non Indo-European languages), Baltic peoples (Lithuanians and Latvians) and Romanians, Bulgarians and Croats.
 * Ukrainians: Many were exterminated, and suspected of supporting the Red Army. Nearly all Ukrainians from the USSR were fighting in Red Army against Nazi. Nazi planners targeted at least 65% of the Ukrainian population for eventual extermination.
 * Russians, Belarusians (from East Slavic group), Serbs (from South Slavic group) were considered to be Untermensch ("under men") in the standard Nazi ideological texts.
 * Poles were considered to be Untermensch ("under men") in Nazi ideology.
 * Enemy nationals who happened to fall under the white "Aryan" racial category (i.e. United States of America and Canada), but were living in Germany at the time, were treated with suspicion by legal restrictions.

These categories were, on the whole, boiled down by the average German to mean "East is bad and West is acceptable."


 * Jews-divided into various degrees of religious denomination, Mischlinge or of half/part-Jewish ancestries (esp. of one Jewish parent, highly illegal under the race laws) and Rassenschande or "Aryan" Germans found as converts into Judaism.
 * "Lebensunwertes Leben" ("Life unworthy of life"). As well as Jews, it included the Gypsies/Roma, also subject to extermination during Porrajmos. Includes minuscule numbers of darker-skinned German nationals: non-whites from colonial Africa. Homosexuals and disabled people (based on physical and mental illnesses) were also considered to be part of this category, and subject to eugenics policies, including compulsory sterilization, internment and deportation.

Nordicist anthropometrics was used to "improve" the racial make-up of the Germanised section of the population, by absorbing individuals into the German population who were deemed suitably Nordic.

Germanization also affected the Sorbs, the minority Slav community living in Saxony and Brandenburg, whose Slavic culture and language was suppressed to absorb them into German identity. Tens of thousands suffered internment and imprisonment as well, to become lesser-known victims of Nazi racial laws.