Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The use of the term "racism" does not easily fall under a single definition.
White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them. White supremacy has roots in scientific racism, and it often relies on pseudoscientific arguments. Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists typically oppose members of other races as well as Jews.
The Aryan race is a racial grouping that emerged in the period of the late 19th century and mid-20th century to describe people of Indo-European heritage.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German-born theorist and an influential ideologue of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and later held several important posts in the Nazi government.
The master race is a concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative Nordic or Aryan races, predominant among Germans and other northern European peoples, are deemed the highest in racial hierarchy. Members of this alleged master race were referred to as Herrenmenschen.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany (1933–45) based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Scientific racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Historically, scientific racist ideas received credence in the scientific community but are no longer considered scientific.
The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany. It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal breeder seeking purebred animals. This was often motivated by belief in a racial hierarchy and the related fear that lower races would "contaminate" a higher one. As with most eugenicists at the time, racial hygienists believed that lack of eugenics would lead to rapid social degeneration, the decline of civilisation by the spread of inferior characteristics.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression which means "people's community". This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and it appealed to the idea of breaking down elitism and uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose. Although the term was not originally used in a racial sense, since the 1920s it began to be used by people with extreme nationalist views and was adopted by the Nazis to promote their racial theories.
The Nordic race was one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race. People of the Nordic type were mostly found in Scandinavia, Northwestern Europe, and countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, such as Germans and Finnic peoples. The psychological traits of Nordics were described as truthful, equitable, competitive, naïve, reserved and individualistic. Other supposed sub-races were the Alpine race, Dinaric race, Iranid race, East Baltic race, and the Mediterranean race.
In the racial anthropology of the early 20th century, the Armenoid type was a subtype of the Caucasian race. According to anthropologist Carleton Coon,questionable source the countries of the northern part of Western Asia, namely Anatolia/Asia Minor, the South Caucasus, Iran, Upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, were considered the center of distribution of the Armenoid race.
Alfred Ploetz was a German physician, biologist, eugenicist known for coining the term racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) and promoting the concept in Germany. Rassenhygiene is a form of eugenics.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century is a 1930 book by Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. The titular "myth" is "the myth of blood, which under the sign of the swastika unchains the racial world-revolution. It is the awakening of the race-soul, which after long sleep victoriously ends the race chaos."
Fritz A Lenz was a German geneticist, member of the Nazi Party, and influential specialist in eugenics in Nazi Germany.
Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer and eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as Race Günther (Rassengünther) or Race Pope (Rassenpapst). He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought. He taught at the universities of Jena, Berlin, and Freiburg, writing numerous books and essays on racial theory. Günther's Short Ethnology of the German People (1929) was a popular exposition of Nordicism. In May 1930, he was appointed to a new chair of racial theory at Jena. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 as the only leading racial theorist to join the party before it assumed power in 1933.
Nazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially based social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan race or Germanic "Übermenschen" master race through eugenics at the center of Nazi ideology. In Germany, eugenics were mostly known under the synonymous term racial hygiene. Following the Second World War, both terms effectively vanished and were replaced by Humangenetik.
Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct racial or ethnic group that has inherent traits or characteristics that are in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different to that of the rest of society. The abhorrence may be expressed in the form of stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as being a threat in some way to the values or safety of society. Racial antisemitism could be seen as worse than religious antisemitism because for religious antisemites conversion was an option and once converted the 'Jew' was gone. With racial antisemitism a Jew could not get rid of their Jewishness.
Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, is a book written by German race researcher and Nazi Party member Hans Günther and published in 1922. The book strongly influenced the racial policy of Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler was so impressed by the work, that he made it the basis of his eugenics policy. The book had gone through six editions by 1926, and by 1945, more than half a million copies had been sold in Germany.
