Nazi racial ideology

Nazism adopted and further developed several hypotheses concerning race. Classifications of human races were made and various measurements of population samples were carried out during the 1930s.

The Nazis claimed to observe scientifically a strict hierarchy of the human race. Hitler's view towards race and people can be found throughout Mein Kampf but more specifically in chapter 11 "Nation and Race".

Hitler made references to an "Aryan Race" founding a superior type of humanity. The purest stock of Aryans according to Nazi ideology was the Nordic people of Germany, England, Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. The Nazis claimed that Germanic people specifically represented a southern branch of the Aryan-Nordic population.

The Nazis regarded Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese as sharing a similar origin with Germans from ancient Indo-Aryan migration. Despite classifying these populations as Aryans and regarding them as more superior in arts than Nordics and Germans, the Nazis considered them less industrious than Nordics, Germans, Western Europeans and Honorary Aryans, thus marginally inferior than these races.

The question of South Tyrol was largely dealt by Hitler and Mussolini pragmatically: this region of Austria's Tyrol, annexed by Italy after 1919, would not become a constituent district of Ostmark (present-day Austria). Ethnic Germans in South Tyrol were given the option of either migrating back to the German Reich or remaining in South Tyrol to undergo forced Italianization.

The Eastern Aryans refers primarily to the Indo-European ethnic groups of Asia. This includes Persians, Kurds, Afghans, Armenians, Georgians, and Northern Indians, according to Albert Gorter and Alfred Rosenberg's Race Theories. Iranians were considered to be 'pure-blooded Aryans' and became immune from all Nuremberg Laws in 1936. Thus, they could become Reich citizens by providing an Aryan certificate, which usually only consisted of presenting an Iranian passport.

Jews, Roma and Slavic peoples (including Poles, Serbs and Russians) were not considered Aryans by Nazi Germany but as subhuman, inferior race. A definition of Aryan that included all non-Jewish Europeans was deemed unacceptable by Nazis, and Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy included a definition defining Aryan as someone who is "tribally" related to "German blood"

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