As everyone knows, the Nazis were all about scientific racism and classifying worth according to ethnicity. On the top were the Aryan Herrenvolk, the master race. On the bottom, Ostjuden; Jews from Eastern Europe.
But…who was in the middle? There are more people in the world than Jews and Germans. How would they rank the rest of us? Would a native American be superior or inferior to a black man? Would a Han Chinese be above or below a Tamil? Who was between the ubermenschen and untermenschen…just a menshen? Did they have charts about how a good National Socialist should treat the various races of the world?
(didn’t use google cuz i don’t want my google cookies to direct nazi adverts to me, lol)
per wikipedia: 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…
Aryans - The blonde blue-eyed ideal. Actually very few of these. Most Germans, for example, were not classified as Aryans. But you could be an Aryan without being a German. But this could change depending on the context. Sometimes you’d see being an Aryan defined as being synonymous with being Nordic or being German or being Indo-European. So the number of Aryans might range from a few thousand to tens of millions depending on circumstances.
Nordisch, Falisch, Ostisch, Westisch, Dinarisch, Ostbaltisch - These were the various subraces that most Germans belonged to. Being a Nordic was considered the best. At this level, the racism was mostly in stereotypes. For example, Nordics were typically considered to be the scientists and inventors while Westisch (Mediterraneans) were typically considered to be artists and musicians and the Ostisch (Alpines) were typically considered to be farmers and laborers.
Mischlinge - People with “mixed” ancestry. Those who had some ancestors who were Untermensh but not enough to be classified themselves as Untermensch.
Untermensch - The “undermen”. This included Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.
As you can see, the system pretty much deals with the classification of people in Germany, which was the main concern of the Nazis when they were rising to power and developing their racial theories. Later, when they were ruling Germany and had to deal with other countries, their race system didn’t really keep up.
One thing they did develop was the Ehrenarier concept by which people who were clearly not Aryans could be designated as Honorary Aryans. The Japanese and the Finns got in under this system for political reasons.
The basic problem with trying to understand this is to assume sort of logic or consistency or that it was immutable and that all of the specifics were widely agreed upon within the Nazi hierachy.
If the Nazis at times presented themselves as scientific racists, the evaluation of the Jews, as a race, being evil was clearly a subjective moral judgement and out of kilter with the supposed objectivity of scientific racism. Their persecution of the Romani Gypsies shows another inconsistency. The Romani language is actually an ‘Ayran’ language, that is to say it belongs to the Indo-Ayran branch of the Indo-European language family, and the Romanis themselves therefore ‘Ayran’. The Nazis did try to restore some consistency to their persecution by declaring that the Romani had become racially diluted by Turkic blood whilst living there. A similar inconsistency was their generally ambivalent treatment and views of the ‘Ayran’ Slavs.
The fact that racial ‘ranking’ was subject to change and often matched what was expedient to Nazi diplomacy can be seen that Hitler was quite happy to state the Japanese were not racially inferior, though on the other hand downgrade the Americans from ‘Nordics’ to ‘Alpines’ when they entered the war against Germany.
Overall Nazi racial policy was driven by radical nationalism, Volkisch prejudices and political expediency; the pseudo-scientific racial theories came behind these motivations and were subservient to them.
One theory that was current amongst the Nazis was that too much heat and exposure to the sun was a cause of racial degeneration. This obviously made Nordics superior, and Jews, originating from the middle east, inferior, although it presumably also meant that black Africans were racially inferior even to Jews. In practice, this did not matter very much to them, however, because there were very few Africans (but many Jews) in Europe in those times. What the Nazis really hated about the Jews was not so much that they were racially inferior, but that they were all over the place, threatening to mix their inferior bloodlines with those of the superior Nordics. (It was the same issue, of course, with the Slavs, who were probably not even all that racially inferior, but, just by the fact that they didn’t look so very different from Germans, were a serious threat to racial purity).
The Nazi psychologist Ernst Jaensch attempted to prove the theory of racial superiority due to “sun exposure” with experiments on chickens. He claimed to show that chickens from more northern climes were of markedly better character - in particular, they were more industrious about pecking up their grain - than chickens from further south in the world.
The Nazis considered the British their Aryan brethren which is why Hitler wanted to make peace with them. Had Churchill and other anti-fascist members of the British govt not stood firmly against them the world would be a *very *different place today. Although Hitler, like the rest of Europe even today, considered America essentially ‘Britain Jr.’ he felt we Americans had lost our way, morally, ethnically (what with ‘negro jazz’ and all) and also that the govt was ultimately run by Jew bankers. Probably contributed to his second greatest blunder ever, declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor (his worst being attacking the Soviet Union too soon).
Not to get to GD-y but Interestingly, especially today, Hitler actually was friendly & made agreements with the Arabs simply because they hated the Jews even more. Didn’t seem to matter to the Arabs that racially, Hitler literally considered them barely half a notch above the Jews.
