The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government, where they would be killed.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Mischling was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and "non-Aryan", such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of 'hybrid', 'mongrel', or 'half-breed'. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.
Emil Maurice was an early member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party and a founding member of the Schutzstaffel (SS). He was Hitler's first personal chauffeur, and was one of several persons of mixed Jewish and ethnic German ancestry to serve in the SS.
“The New Order” of Europe collectively refers to various political and social concepts Nazi Germany sought to impose on German-occupied Europe and beyond.
A German Blood Certificate was a document provided by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to Mischlinge, declaring them deutschblütig. This practice was begun sometime after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and allowed exemption from most of Germany's racial laws.
Das Schwarze Korps was the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel (SS). This newspaper was published on Wednesdays and distributed free of charge. All SS members were encouraged to read it. The chief editor was SS leader Gunter d'Alquen; the publisher was Max Amann of the Franz-Eher-Verlag publishing company. The paper was hostile to many groups, with frequent articles condemning the Catholic Church, Jews, Communism, Freemasonry, and others.
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later by anti-miscegenation laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between ethnic Germans and non-Aryans, regardless of citizenship. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally; later, they were punished systematically and legally.
Untermensch is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', which was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs.
The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Black People, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, and Greeks to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as the Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and Indo-Aryan people people were considered inferior.
Nazi Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and a year following the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 41% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig, and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants were over-represented in the Nazi Party's membership and electorate, and Catholics were under-represented.
Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe was an Austrian princess by her marriage to the diplomat Prince Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a member of the noble Hohenlohe family. She was born a commoner, allegedly of Jewish family background.
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political career, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards traditional Christian ideals, but later abandoned them. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also staunchly criticized atheism.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
Mischling Test refers to the legal test under Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws that was applied to determine whether a person was considered a "Jew" or a Mischling (mixed-blood).
The Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation, was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. The territorial claims for the Greater Germanic Reich fluctuated over time. As early as the autumn of 1933, Adolf Hitler envisioned annexing such territories as Bohemia, western Poland, and Austria to Germany and the formation of satellite or puppet states without independent economies or policies of their own.
The propaganda of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945 promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, notably Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including Heldentod, Führerprinzip, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut und Boden and pride in the Germanic Herrenvolk. Propaganda was also used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas. After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda vilified Germany's enemies, notably the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in 1943 exhorted the population to total war.
In Nazi Germany, women were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which promoted exclusion of women from the political and academic life of Germany as well as its executive body and executive committees. On the other hand, whether through sheer numbers, lack of local organization, or both, many German women did indeed become Nazi Party members. In spite of this, the Nazi regime officially encouraged and pressured women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all other positions of responsibility, including political and academic spheres.
There were many areas annexed by Nazi Germany both immediately before and throughout the course of World War II. Territories that were part of Germany before the annexations were known as the "Altreich".
