Nazism and race

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 human race. Hitler's view towards race and people could be found in Chapter 11 of his doctrinal book, Mein Kampf.

Hitler has made references to an "Aryan Race" founding a superior type of humanity. The purest stock of Aryans, according to him, was the Nordic people of Sweden and Norway. The Nazis claimed that Germanic people represented a southern branch of the Aryan-Nordic population. Hitler's ideals for German men were blonde hair, slim built, strong and tough; this combined with his fascination towards opera characters in Richard Wagner's Parsifal and Lohengrin.

The Nazis, for political purposes, classified Celtic and Anglo-Saxon populations in France and the United Kingdom as secondary to Germans. Chinese and Japanese, although non-Aryan in origin, were bestowed the status of Ehrenarien (Honorary Aryans) so that they could conduct lives and businesses in the German Reich without notable difficulties. Hitler respected these ancient civilizations and their strength of keeping intact their traditional cultures in the face of foreign colonization.

The Nazis regarded Greeks, Italians and Spanish 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 as 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.

Hitler shifted the blame of Germany's loss in the First World War upon "enemies from within". In the face of economic hardship as triggered by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), Jews who resided in Germany were blamed for sabotaging the country. The Nazis therefore classified them as the most inferior race and used derogatory terms Untermensch (sub-human) and Schwein (pig).

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Wikipedia