Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The racial policy of Nazi Germany refers to the policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the so-called "Aryan race" and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy. It was combined with a eugenics programme which aimed to achieve “racial purity” of the “Aryan race”, using compulsory sterilizations and extermination of specific minorities, culminating in the Holocaust. The Nazi ideology and policies targeted first of all Jews, who were considered as the most “inferior races” of all, on a hierarchy which included Jews at the bottom and the “Herrenvolk” (“Master race”) of the “Volksgemeinschaft” (German “national community”) at the top.

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, 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 peoples 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.

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 soon as July 1933). The Nazi Party used popular anti-semitism to gain votes. Jews were used as political scapegoats. They blamed poverty, unemployment, and the loss of World War I 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 to the Jewish Problem”, which was decided by Hitler during World War II and officialized at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference.

On April 1, 1933, Jewish doctors, lawyers, police, teachers and stores were boycotted. Only six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, banning Jews from government jobs. 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.

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 on June 30-July 1, 1934, during which the SS attacked the SA, considered by Hitler to be too “revolutionary”, the SS became the dominant policing power in Germany. Heinrich Himmler was eager to please Hitler, and so willingly obeyed his orders. Since the SS had been Hitler's personal bodyguard, they were even more obedient and loyal to Hitler than the SA had been. They were also supported by the army, which was now more willing to comply with Hitler's decisions than when the SA had still existed.

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 words over the law. Hitler now had more direct control over the government and political attitude to Jews 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 Gentile. 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 "Sarah" (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 public 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 over the treatment of his parents by the Nazi-Germans. 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
The Reichsvertretung* der Juden in Deutschland (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 Juden in Deutschland 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. However, they were thought to "share certain racial characteristics with Jews." Roma were eventually declared to be non-Aryan, sometimes lower than Jews or more racially comparable to Africans and the Nazis exterminated at least 200,000 Roma during Porrajmos (extermination of Gypsies). Non-Indo-European Africans and Asians were automatically excluded.

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
In Nazi-occupied countries throughout Europe, the Nazis encountered small Chinese, east Indian, Kabyle/Algerian and Latin American communities mostly made of hired workers and diplomats were classified as Untermenschen ("inferior peoples"), along with most Slavic and Hungarian peoples.

The racial restrictions were relaxed for Waffen-SS soldiers to the extent that Turkic Tatar, or Mongol Kalmyk units were recruited. A similar formation was the Indische Freiwilligen-Legion Regiment 950 (also known at various stages as the Indische Freiwilligen-Legion der Waffen-SS and Azad Hind Fauj.)

In Spring of 1943, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, was recruited by the Nazis to assist in the organization and recruitment of Bosniaks into several divisions of the SS Waffen and other units in Yugoslavia. He was successful in convincing the Bosniaks to go against the declarations of the Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka Clerics, who had since 1941, forbidden Bosnian Muslims to collaborate with Croat-Nazis (Ustashe).

Groups which were legally classified as non-Aryan could also be designated Honorary Aryans so that legal restrictions on non-Aryans no longer applied to them.

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 (Krigens Barn) 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).

Poles and East Slavs
The main targets of the Nazi Genocide were the Jews of Europe, of whom approximately six million were killed, including 1.5 million children. Other targets included Roma, mentally ill, homosexuals, political opponents. 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 fulfilment 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.

In ten years' time, the plan called for the extermination, expulsion, enslavement or Germanisation of most or all Poles and East Slavs living behind the front lines in Europe. Instead, 250 million Germans would live in an extended Lebensraum ("living space") of the 1000-Year Reich (Tausendjähriges Reich). Fifty years after the war, under the Große Planung, Generalplan Ost foresaw the eventual expulsion and extermination of more than 50 million Slavs beyond the Ural Mountains.

Of the Poles, by 1952 only about 3-4 million people were supposed to be left residing in the former Poland, and then only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles (believed by the Nazis to be Untermenschen, that is "sub-people") would cease to exist.

A Russian historian Vadim Erlikman has detailed Soviet losses totaling 26.5 million war related deaths. Military losses of 10.6 million include 7.6 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million POW dead, plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses. 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 labor; 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
Slavs(such as Poles, Czechs and Russians) were considered sub-human a racially inferior race, 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:

Enemy nationals who happened to fall under the "Aryan" racial category, but were living in Germany at the time, were treated with suspicion by legal restrictions. Non-Aryan allies of the Nazi government could be classified as honorary Aryans.
 * Germans from Germany (Reichdeutsche) - Nordic Germans are said most favorable, but all German citizens are in the top category.
 * Germans from outside, active ethnic Germans, honorary "Aryans" from axis European countries in Volksliste category 1 and 2 (see Volksdeutsche).
 * Germans from outside, passive Germans and members of families, handicapped, political dissidents, common criminals in Volksliste category 3 and 4.
 * Other Germanic peoples closely related to Germans (Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, and Dutch) but treated as categories 1 and 2 in most privileges, especially pro-Nazi sympathizers).
 * Spaniards, Basques and Italians (Northern regional Italian groups from Tuscany or Lombardy and Spaniards treated as category 1 and 2, but darker-skinned Sicilians and southern regional Italian groups treated as least. May include Greeks also).
 * Britons from Great Britain (includes Irish, Scots, Welsh, and English)
 * French people in France (except German speaking Alsatians, and pro-Nazi French supporters in categories 1 and 2).
 * Highlanders (Goralenvolk): an attempt to split the Polish nation by using local collaborators.
 * Poles, Czechs and Slovaks (include non-Germans: Estonians, Lithuanians and Finns from the Baltic states).
 * Hungarians, Albanians and Croats (may include Serbs of non-Jewish faiths, Romanians and Bulgarians).
 * Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians (may include Ruthenians and Armenians).

The categories of "races" deemed unworthy and subject to discrimination.
 * Jews (eventually sentenced to extermination as a category)-divided into various degrees of religious denomination, mischelinge or of half/part-Jewish ancestries (esp. of one Jewish parent, highly illegal under the race laws) and rassendesgras or "Aryan" Germans found as converts into Judaism.
 * "Untermenschen" (lit. "Under-human"). It included the Gypsies/Roma, also subject to extermination during Porrajmos. Includes minuscule numbers of darker-skinned German nationals: non-whites from colonial African, Middle Eastern, Asiatic and Latin American origin - if of evident non-European ancestries, residing in Germany at the time. Homosexuals and disabled people were also considered to be part of this category, and subject to eugenics policies, including compulsory sterilization, internment, etc.

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.