One of the stories you hear trotted out from time to time about Nazi Germany was that they published propaganda referring to the Japanese as “Yellow Aryans”. The story obviously illustrates a certain idiocy inherent in Nazi racial theories, and it’s delightful in demonstrating the hypocrisy of the Nazi Party. But is there any evidence that it’s actually true? I can’t seem to find any direct evidence that it happened, and I have to wonder if perhaps it’s such a good story that it’s been repeated despite perhaps not being true. Does anyone know anything about this? What evidence can be found that the Nazis actually made this claim?
I did a quick google search and didn’t come up with anything substantial. There is, interestingly enough, a thread just like this one over on Stormfront. I won’t link to it, but just search for japanese = honorary aryans and you’ll get it. Nothing in wiki either.
Yeah, I found quite a number of delightful forums for many different racist ideologies in a Google search. None of them seemed to have any useful information (it was quite a shock to learn that the folks on the White Power boards aren’t very academic.)
The nazi racial classification did not really match the common american one and it was less color-focused than the simple “blond and blue-eyed” cliche suggests. For example they saw far more significant distinctions within the “caucasians” and placed the slavs near the bottom of the global pecking order. Of course there was a good deal of pragmatism involved in the relations with Japan, but the positive view was not really that inconsistent with nazi ideology. An “ancient pure civilization” fighting for dominance in a sphere where it didn’t compete with Germany in any way certainly was a positive thing to them. I am not aware of any claims that the Japanese were Aryans by any tortured definition, but their struggle in Asia was in a way seen as mirroring Germany’s in Europe.
Yeah, I understand the general sympathies many of the Nazis felt for Japan (some of the top officers were great admirers of Japanese culture, because they saw parallels to German culture.) But the specific phrase “Yellow Aryans” was used by the Nazis (or so it’s claimed), and it’s quite clearly ridiculous. “Aryan” was fairly commonly used at the time due to a mistaken belief that Aryan (that is, Vedic Indian) culture was ancestral to the entire Indo-European culture. Under any stretch, the idea that the Japanese are in any way Aryan or Indo-European is simply bizarre, and if indeed the story is true then it shows just how much they were willing to let politics subvert their “ideals”. I’m looking for specific information on the “Yellow Aryan” claim, not general information about the nuances of Nazi racism.
Well, Hitler did say about the Japanese in Mein Kampf
FWIW, the German phrase that would translate as “yellow Aryans” would be “gelbe Arier”, and there are zero Google listings for that phrase.
Sorry, I didn’t take the phrase literally because it seemed so far out even by nazi standards. “Ehrenarier”/“Honorary Aryan” is sometimes used as a half-mocking term for people who were exempt from the racial restrictions in the Third Reich by order from the highest levels of the administration, especially under §7 of the decree accompanying the 1935 citizenship law. I don’t think I have ever seen any official use or any original use referring to the Japanese.
I think that the ‘honorary’ Aryan thing was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
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Apparently the Nazis honoured the Arabs in recognition of their outstanding devotion to hating the Jews, with the special racial category of “non-non-Aryans”.