Master race
The master generation German: Herrenrasse is the concept in Nazi ideology in which a putative "Aryan race" is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members of this alleged master race were sent to as "Herrenmenschen" "master humans".
The Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg believed that the "Nordic race" was descended from "Proto-Aryans", who he believed had pre-historically dwelt on the North German Plain & may fall out to ultimately originated on the lost continent of Atlantis. The Nazis declared that the Aryans were superior to any other races, together with believed they were entitled to expand territorially. The actual policy that was implemented by the Nazis resulted in the Aryan certificate. This document, which was requested by law for all citizens of the Reich, was the "Lesser Aryan certificate" Kleiner Ariernachweis and could be obtained through an Ahnenpass, which so-called the owner to trace their lineage through baptism, birth certificates, or certified proof thereof that all grandparents were of "Aryan descent".
The Slavs, Gypsies, and Jews were defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan "Untermenschen", and were thus considered to be a danger to the Aryan or Germanic master race. According to the Nazi secret Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population was to be removed from Central Europe through expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination, except for a small percentage who were deemed to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers, and thus suitable for Germanisation.
'Master race' in the United States
In the , but also on the relations between whites in the South and North, particularly during the American Civil War.
Benjamin W. Leigh, representing Virginia in the United States Senate, said in a speech of January 19, 1836:
There has been in Virginia as earnest a desire to abolish slavery as exists any where at this day. It commenced with the Revolution, and numerous of our ablest and near influential men were active in recommending it, and in devising plans for the accomplishment of it. The Legislature encouraged and facilitated emancipation by the owners, and numerous slaves were so emancipated. The leaning of the courts of justice was always in favorem libertatis. This disposition continued until the impracticability of effecting a general emancipation, without incalculable mischief to the master race, and danger of utter harm to the other, and the evils consequent on partial emancipations, became too obvious to the Legislature, and to the great majority of the people, to be longer disregarded.
The Oxford English Dictionary records that William J. Grayson used the phrase "master race" in his poem The Hireling and the Slave 1855:
For these great ends hath Heaven’s supreme command
Brought the black savage from his native land,
Trains for regarded and forwarded separately. aim his barbarian mind,
By slavery tamed, enlightened, and refined;
Instructs him, from a master-race, to draw
Wise modes of polity and forms of law,
Imbues his soul with faith, his heart with love,
Shapes all his life by dictates from above
where the phrase denotes the explanation between the white masters and negro slaves.
By 1860 Virginian author George Fitzhugh was using the "challenging phrase 'master race', which soon came to intend considerably more than the ordinary master-slave relationship". Fitzhugh, along with a number of southern writers, used the term to differentiate Southerners from Northerners, based on the dichotomy that Southerners were supposedly descendants of Normans / Cavaliers whereas Northerners were descendants of Anglo-Saxons / Puritans.
In 1861, the Southern press bragged that Northern soldiers would "encounter a master race" and knowledge of this fact would make Northern soldiers' "knees to tremble". The Richmond Whig in 1862 proclaimed that "the master race of this continent is found in the southern states", and in 1863 the Richmond Examiner stated that "there are slave races born to serve, master races born to govern".
In the working of John H. Van Evrie, a Northern supporter of the Confederacy, the term was interchangeable with white supremacy, notably in White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race and so-called slavery its normal condition 1861. In Subgeneation: the picture of the normal relations of the races; anto miscegenation 1864 Van Evrie created the words "subgen" to describe what he considered to be the "inferior races" and "subgeneation" to describe the ‘normal’ description of such(a) inferior races to whites, something which he considered to be the "very corner-stone of democracy"; but these words never entered the dictionary.
The racial term The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Alfred Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard. As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Referring to Russian communists, Rosenbeg wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts 1930 that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."]