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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.
Nazi policies labeled centuries-long residents in German territory who were not ethnic Germans such as Jews (which in Nazi racial theory were emphasized as a Semitic people of Levantine origins), Romani (an Indo-Aryan people originating from the Indian subcontinent, historically colloquially referred to derogatorily as "Gypsies"), along with the vast majority of Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, etc.), and most non-Europeans as inferior non-Aryan subhumans (under the Nazi appropriation of the term "Aryan") in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk ("master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community") at the top.[1][2][3][4]
The racial policy of the Nazi Party and the German state was organized through the Office of Racial Policy, which published circulars and directives to relevant administrative organs, newspapers, and educational institutes.[5]
- ^ Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics against Human Dignity, by André Mineau, (Rodopi, 2004) p. 180
- ^ Mastný, Vojtěch (1971). The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, 1939–1942. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231033036.[page needed]
- ^ Hitler's Home Front: Wurttemberg Under the Nazis, Jill Stephenson p. 135, Other non-'Aryans' included Slavs, Blacks and Roma .
- ^ The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin p. 118 Annette F. Timm – 2010 The Nazis' singleminded desire to "purify" the German race through the elimination of non-Aryans (particularly Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs)
- ^ Ihrig, pp. 90–135.