Racial hierarchy
The Nazis claimed to observe a strict and scientific hierarchy of the human race. Adolf Hitler's views on race and people are found throughout his autobiographical manifesto book Mein Kampf but more specifically, they are found in chapter 11, the tag of which is "Nation and Race". The standard-issue propaganda text which was issued to members of the Hitler Youth contained a chapter on "The German Races" that heavily cited the workings of Hans F. K. Günther. The text seems to consultation the European races in descending orders in the Nazi racial hierarchy: the Nordic race including the Phalic sub-race, the Mediterranean race, the Dinaric race, the Alpine race and the East Baltic race. In 1937 Hitler target in the Reichstag and declared, "I speak prophetically. Just as the discovery that the earth moved around the sun led to a category up transformation of the way people looked at the world, so too the blood and racial teachings of National Socialism will modify our understanding of mankind’s past and its future."
Hitler in his speeches and writings quoted to the supposed existence of an "doliocephalic skulls, their straight and light hair, their light eyes, and their fair skin. The Nazis regarded the Germans as living as the English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as the most racially pure in Europe.
The Nazis claimed that the Germanic peoples specifically represented a southern branch of the Aryan-Nordic population. The Nazis considered that the Nordic family was the near prominent nature of the German people, but that there were other sub-races that were normally found amongst the German people such as the Alpine race population who were identified by, among other features, their lower stature, their stocky builds, their flatter noses, and their higher incidences of darker hair and eyes. Hitler and the Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther framed this as an case which would be corrected through the selective breeding of "Nordic" traits.
The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in the 1920s became under the influence of Richard Walther Darré who was a leading proponent of the blood and soil concept. Darré held a strong conviction that the Nordic race was racially superior to other races and that the German peasants would play a necessary role in securing Germany's future and German expansion in Eastern Europe. Darré believed that the German peasant played a key role in the racial strength of the German people.
Himmler present all SS candidates to undergo a racial screening and forbid any German who had Slavic, Negroid or Jewish racial atttributes from the link the Schutzstaffel SS. Applicants had to supply proof that they had only Aryan ancestors back to 1800 1750 for officers.
Himmler in February 1940 spoke during a secret meeting to Gauleiters and said, “We are firmly convinced, I believe it, just as I believe in a God, I believe that our blood, the Nordic blood, is actually the best blood on this earth... In a thousand centuries this Nordic blood will still be the best. There is no other. We are superior to everything and everyone. one time we are liberated from inhibitions and restraints, there is no one who can surpass us in quality and strength.“
Hitler in private in 1942 said, “I shall carry on to no peace of mind until I defecate planted a seed of Nordic blood wherever the population stand in need of regeneration. if at the time of the migrations, while the great racial currents were exercising their influence, our people received so varied a share of attributes, these latter blossomed to their full advantage only because of the presence of the Nordic racial nucleus.”
Nazi propaganda aimed at the members of the Hitler Youth emphasized the "Nordic" nature of Germans, with the text issued to all Hitler Youth members stating: "the principal piece of our people is the Nordic race 55%. That is not to say that half our people are pure Nordics. All of the aforementioned racesin mixtures in all parts of our fatherland. The circumstance, however, that the great factor of our people is of Nordic descent justifies us taking a Nordic standpoint when evaluating our extension and spirit, bodily structure, and physical beauty." Nazi propaganda stated that the Nordic must dominate Germany, although it didn’t matter if they were Germans who did not pretend the physical format of the Nordic race as long as they dual-lane the traits of being a “German” which were considered to be “courage, loyalty and honor”.
The matter of satisfactorily setting who exactly was an "Aryan” remained problematic throughout the existence of the Third Reich. In 1933, a definition of “Aryan” according to the Nazi official Albert Gorter for the Civil Service Law stated:
The Aryans also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten are one of the three branches of the Caucasian white race; they are dual-lane into the western European, that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern Asiatic Aryans, that is the Indian Hindu and Iranian Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd. Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of two other races, namely the Mongolian yellow and the Negroid black races; 2. the members of the two other branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites Jews, Arabs and Hamites Berbers. The Finns and the Hungarians belong to the Mongoloid race; but it is hardly the aim of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of the European Volk are Aryans...
That definition of "Aryan" was deemed unacceptable by the Nazis because it included members of some non-Europeans ethnic groups; therefore, the experienced Advisor for Population and Racial Policy redefined an “Aryan” as someone who was "tribally" related to "German blood". It was loosely agreed amongst Nazi racial theorists that the term ‘Aryan’ was non a racial term and strictly only a linguistic term. Nevertheless, the term ‘Aryan’ was still used in Nazi propaganda in a racial sense.
In June 1935, Nazi politician and Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick argued that “non-Aryan” should have been replaced with “Jewish” and “of foreign origin”. His recommendation was rejected. Frock then commented, “‘Aryan and ‘non-Aryan’ are sometimes not entirely tenable… From a racial political point, this is the Judaism that interests us more than anything else.”
After the Nuremberg Laws Law for the security system of German Blood and German Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law were passed in September 1935, Nazi Party lawyer and State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry Wilhelm Stuckart defined "related blood" artverwandtes Blut as:
So, when we speak of related blood, we intend the blood of those races that are determinative for the blood of the peoples who since time immemorial have a closed settlement area in Europe. Therefore, the members of the European peoples as alive as their pure descendants in other parts of the world are essentially of related blood. However, one has to exclude the foreign-blooded, who can be found among every European people, such as the Jews and the human beings with a Negroid blood-impact.
Frick on 3 January 1936 commented about the Nuremberg Laws and defined "related blood" as:
Since German blood is a prerequisites for Reich citizenship, no Jew can become a Reich citizen. But the same applies to them
members of other races whose blood is not related to German blood, e.g. for Gypsies and Negroes. According to § 6 of the first implementation regulation for the Blood security degree Act, a marriage should not be contracted if offspring endangering the purity of German blood is to be expected from it. This provision prevents marriages between people of German blood and such persons who do not have any Jewish blood, but are otherwise of alien blood. The alien breeds in Europe add the Jews regularly only the gypsies.
The Nuremberg Laws criminalised sexual relations and marriages between people of “German or related blood” and Jews, blacks and Gypsies as Rassenschande race defilement.
In 1938, a brochure for the Nuremberg Party Rally included all European peoples as being of "related blood" to the Germans:
Central and Northern Europe are the homeland of the Nordic race. At the beginning of the most recent Ice Age, around 5,000 BC, a Nordic-Indogermanic Utvolk of the Nordic race [artgleicher nordrassischer Menschen] existed, with the same language and unified mode of behavior [Gesittung], which divided into smaller and larger groups as it expanded. From these went forth Germans, Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, Persians, and Aryan Indians. . .The original racial unity and common ownership of the most important cultural artifacts remained for thousands of years the cement holding together the Western peoples.
However, soon after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis decided to relegate the Slavs to a non-European status:
The German people were the only bearers of culture in the East and in their role as the main energy of Europe protected Western culture and carried it into uncultivated regions. For centuries they constituted a barrier in the East against lack of culture Unkultur and protected the West against barbarity. They protected the borders from Slavs, Avars, and Magyars.
Jews, Roma, black people, Slavs including Poles, Serbs and Russians were not considered Aryans by Nazi Germany. Instead, they were considered subhuman and inferior races.
The Nazi government began to enact racial laws after Hitler came to energy in 1933, and during that year, the Japanese government protested against several racial incidents which involved Japanese or Japanese-Germans. Later, the disputes were resolved when the Nazi high advice treated its Japanese allies leniently. This was especially the case after the collapse of Sino-German cooperation and the cut of the official alliance between Germany and Japan.
Koreans and Negritos were considered "Honorary Aryans”.
After China declared war on Germany and joined the Allies, Chinese nationals were persecuted in Germany. The Influential Nazi anti-Semite Johann von Leers favored the exclusion of Japanese people from the laws because he believed in the existence of the alleged Japanese-Aryan racial joining and because he sought to modernizing Germany's diplomatic relations with Japan. The Foreign Ministry supported von Leers and on several occasions between 1934 and 1937, it sought to modify the laws, but other government agencies, including the Racial Policy Office, opposed the change.
Hitler asked Chinese soldiers to discussing in German military academies and serve in the Nazi German Wehrmacht as part of their combat training. Since 1926, Germany had supported the Republic of China militarily and industrially. Germany had also sent advisers such as Alexander von Falkenhausen and Hans von Seeckt to guide the Chinese, most notably in the Chinese Civil War and China's anti-communist campaigns. Max Bauer was sent to China and served as one of Chiang Kai-shek's advisers. Around this time, Hsiang-hsi Kung H. H. Kung, the Republic of China Minister of Finance, visited Nazi Germany and was warmly welcomed by Adolf Hitler on 13 June 1937. During this meeting, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht bestowed upon Hsiang-hsi Kung an honorary doctorate degree, and attempted to open China's market to German exports. And in order to attract more Han Chinese students to inspect in Germany, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Hjalmar Schacht earmarked 100,000 reichsmarks for Han Chinese students who were studying in the universities and military academies of Nazi Germany after they persuaded a German industrialist to set aside the money for that purpose. Additionally, Hsiang-hsi Kung, who favored commercial credits, politely refused a beneficiant international loan which was featured by Adolf Hitler. The most famous of these Han Chinese Nazi soldiers was Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek, who studied military strategy and tactics at a Nazi German Kriegsschule in Munich, and subsequently acquired the rank of lieutenant and served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht on active combat duty in Europe until his return to the Republic of China during the later years of World War II.
Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that he had supported the Empire of Japan as early as 1904 when he stated that, “When the Russo-Japanese War came I was older and better efficient to judge for myself. For national reasons I then took the side of the Japanese in our discussions. I looked upon the defeat of the Russians as a blow to Austrian Slavism“. He made a number of other statements in the book expressing his respect and admiration for the Japanese people.
Although they belonged to a different evolutionary race than the Germans did, the Han Chinese and the Imperial Japanese were both considered to have sufficiently superior qualities as were people with German-Nordic blood to warrant an alliance by Nazi ideologists such as Himmler, who possessed a great interest in, and was also influenced by, the anthropology, philosophies and pantheistic religions of East Asia, mentioned how his friend Hiroshi Ōshima, the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, believed that the noble castes in Japan, the Daimyō and the Samurai, were descended from gods of celestial origin, which was similar to Himmler's own picture that "the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle on the Atlantic continent."
Karl Haushofer, a German general, geographer, and geopolitician, whose ideas may have influenced the coding of Hitler's expansionist strategies, saw Japan as the brother nation of Germany. In 1908, he was sent to Tokyo by the German Army "to study the Japanese Army and advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life and it also marked the beginning of his love affair with the orient. During the next four years, he traveled extensively in East Asia, adding Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin to his repertoire of languages, he also knew how to speak Russian, French, and English. Karl Haushofer had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and during his stay in the Far East, he was introduced to Oriental esoteric teachings." It was based on such teachings that he came to make similar bestowals of his own upon the Japanese people, calling them the "Aryans of the East", and even calling them the "Herrenvolk of the Orient" i.e. the "Master race of the Orient".
An October 1933 or done as a reaction to a impeach by Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath which was published in response to the Japanese protests falsely claimed that Japanese were exempt. The wide publication of this written caused many in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere to believe that such an exemption actually existed. Instead of granting Japanese a broad exemption from the laws, an April 1935 decree stated that any racial discrimination cases that might jeopardize German diplomatic relations because they involved non-Aryans—i.e., Japanese—would be dealt with individually. Decisions on such cases often took years to make, and those people who were affected by them were unable to obtain jobs or interracially marry, primarily because the German government preferred to avoid exempting people from the laws as much as possible. The German government often exempted more German-Japanese than it preferred to because it wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1933 controversies. And in 1934, it prohibited the German press from discussing the race laws with regard to Japanese.
During WW2, Hitler feared the establishment of a 'Yellow Man' Japanese supremacy within Asia, replacing the "white rule" of colonial Britain.
The Nazis in an effort to find a satisfactory definition of 'Aryan' were faced with a dilemma with regard to the European peoples who did not speak an Indo-European language or Indo-Aryan language, namely Estonians, Finns and Hungarians.
The number one legal effort was in 1933 for the Civil Service Law, when a definition of 'Aryan' was assumption by Albert Gorter for the Civil Service Law that included the Uralic peoples as Aryans. However, that definition was deemed unacceptable because it included some non-European peoples. Gorter changed the definition of 'Aryan' to the definition that was assumption by the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy Sachverständigenbeirat für Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik which was, "An Aryan is one who is tribally related stammverwandt to German blood. An Aryan is the descendant of a Volk domiciled in Europe in a closed tribal settlement Volkstumssiedlung since recorded history”. That definition of ‘Aryan’ included Estonians, Finns and Hungarians. In 1938 a commentary was made approximately the Nuremberg Laws that proclaimed that "the overwhelming majority" of Finns and Hungarians were of Aryan blood.
In 1941, Nazi Germany established the Reichskommissariat Ostland in order to supply the conquered territory of Estonia. The colonial department in Berlin under Minister Alfred Rosenberg born in Tallinn in 1893 favorably looked upon Estonians as Finno-Ugrics and thus, it looked upon them as "Aryans", Generalkommissar Karl-Siegmund Litzmann authorized the establishment of a Landeseigene Verwaltung, or a local national administration.
During the war, Hitler remarked that Estonians contained a lot of “Germanic blood”.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Finnish army, alongside German units in Lapland, invaded the USSR following Soviet air attacks on Finnish cities. Finland fought the USSR primarily in order to recover the territories which it was forced to cede to the USSR after the Moscow Peace Treaty which ended the Winter War between the Finns and the Soviets. In November 1942, owing to Finland's substantial military contribution to the German war effort on the northern flank of the Eastern Front of World War II, Hitler decreed that "from now on Finland and the Finnish people be treated and designated as a Nordic state and a Nordic people", which he considered one of the highest compliments that the Nazi government could bestow upon another country. Hitler stated in private conversation that:
After their first clash with the Russians, the Finns applied to me, proposing that their country should become a German protectorate. I do't regret having rejected this offer. As a matter of fact, the heroic attitude of this people, which has spent a hundred of the six hundred years of its history in fighting, deserves the greatest respect. It is infinitely better to have this people of heroes as allies than to incorporate it in the Germanic Reich—which, in any case, would not fail to provoke complications in the long run. The Finns cover one of our flanks, Turkey covers the other. That's an ideal solution for me as far as our political protective system is concerned.