Related Research Articles
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, primarily known for being a main architect of the Holocaust.
The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern Indo-Iranians as an epithet of "noble". Anthropological, historical, and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
The master race is a pseudoscientific concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative "Aryan race" is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as "Herrenmenschen".
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.
The Völkisch movement was a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk from the Germans.
Aryanism is an ideology of racial supremacy which views the supposed Aryan race as a distinct and superior racial group which is entitled to rule the rest of humanity. Initially promoted by racist theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Aryanism reached its peak of influence in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s and 40s, the regime applied the ideology with full force, sparking World War II with the 1939 invasion of Poland in pursuit of Lebensraum, or living space, for the Aryan people. The racial policies which were implemented by the Nazis during the 1930s came to a head during their conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union, culminating in the industrial mass murder of six million Jews and eleven million other victims in what is now known as the Holocaust.
The Allgemeine SS was a major branch of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany; it was managed by the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt). The Allgemeine SS was officially established in the autumn of 1934 to distinguish its members from the SS-Verfügungstruppe, which later became the Waffen-SS, and the SS-Totenkopfverbände, which were in charge of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. SS formations committed many war crimes against civilians and allied servicemen.
Nordicism is an ideology which views the historical race concept of the "Nordic race" as an endangered and superior racial group. Some notable and seminal Nordicist works include Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race (1916); Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853); the various writings of Lothrop Stoddard; Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899); and, to a lesser extent, William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). The ideology became popular in the late-19th and 20th centuries in Germanic-speaking Europe, Northwestern Europe, Central Europe, and Northern Europe, as well as in North America and Australia.
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.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century is a 1930 book by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and official who was convicted of crimes against humanity and other crimes at the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946. Rosenberg was one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party and editor of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1941, history professor Peter Viereck wrote: "In molding Germany's 'psychology of frightfulness' Rosenberg wields an influence as powerful as that of the much publicized Goebbels and the much feared Himmler and his secret police."
The Nazi Party of Germany adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its ideology (Nazism) in order to justify the genocide of groups of people which it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race", and they considered black people, mixed-race people, Slavs, Roma, Jews and other ethnicities racially inferior "sub-humans", whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism, and anti-Semitism. The term "Aryan" belongs in general to the discourses of Volk.
Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as "Rassengünther" or "Rassenpapst". He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought.
Nazi archaeology was a field of pseudoarcheology led and encouraged by various Nazi leaders and Ahnenerbe figures, such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, which directed archaeologists and other scholars to search Germany's archeological past in order to find material evidence supporting an advanced, Aryan ancestry as alleged and espoused by the ultranationalist Nazi Party.
Hermann Gauch was a Nazi race theorist noted for his dedication to Nordic theory to an extent that embarrassed the Nazi leadership when he claimed that Italians were "half ape". Briefly adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, his career was later stalled by Himmler himself. During World War II he served with distinction in the Yugoslav campaign.
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 ideology of the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary force and an instrument of terror of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, emphasized a racist vision of "racial purity", primarily based on antisemitism and loyalty to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
The SS Education Office (SS-Schulungsamt) was one of the Nazi organizations responsible for the ideological indoctrination of members of the SS. The office operated initially under the jurisdiction of the Reich Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) but was later subordinated to the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt).
The Nordic Indo-Germanic people is a mythological group, from which the Germanic peoples allegedly descended. The assumption of the existence of this primordial people was developed by nationalists in the German territories from the early 19th century onwards, and was the subject of intense research in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Nineteenth-century German philologists, ethnologists and historians initially focused their research on the Eastern origins of Germanic populations. Then, in a second phase, these researchers changed the focus of their work to demonstrate the Nordic origin of Germanic populations and civilization. These results were soon deliberately exploited in the debate on German identity that raged throughout the nineteenth century.
According to Nazi theorists, denordification is the racial counterpart of the political decadence experienced by peoples throughout their history. The concept was coined by Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, based on his analysis of the decadence of Rome and Ancient Greece.
References
- ↑ Conte & Essner (1995 , p. 99)
- ↑ Conte & Essner (1995 , p. 100)
- ↑ Conte & Essner (1995 , p. 110)
- ↑ Conte & Essner (1995 , p. 105)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , p. 258)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , pp. 260–262)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , p. 563)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , p. 572)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , p. 577)
- ↑ Longerich (2010 , p. 575)
Bibliography
- Chapoutot, Johann (2008). Le Nazisme et l'Antiquité (in French). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 978-2-13-060899-8.
- Conte, Édouard; Essner, Cornelia; et al. (Histoire des gens) (1995). La Quête de la race : Une anthropologie du nazisme (in French). Paris: Hachette. ISBN 978-2-01-017992-1.
- Longerich, Peter (2010). Himmler : L'éclosion quotidienne d'un monstre ordinaire (in French). Paris: Héloise d'Ormesson editions. ISBN 978-2-35087-137-0.
