Knowra Aryan race Aryan race The Aryan race was a discredited racial category used to claim that some peoples formed an inherently superior group. Nazi ideology made it central to its hierarchy of human worth and persecution.
Indo-Aryan peoples : A diverse group of peoples associated with Indo-Aryan languages and cultures of South Asia. The historical term's genuine linguistic and cultural uses differ from the imagined biological race.
Nazi racial policy : The laws and state practices through which Nazi Germany ranked people by ancestry and enforced racial hierarchy. It converted the Aryan ideal into legal discrimination, exclusion, and mass violence.
Indo-European languages : A large language family that includes English, Persian, Hindi, Greek, and many other languages. A linguistic relationship among languages does not establish a biological race or a hierarchy.
Antisemitism : Hostility, prejudice, or discrimination directed against Jews as Jews. Nazi Aryan identity defined Jews as a racial enemy, intensifying antisemitic persecution.
Proto-Indo-European language : The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Comparative linguistics supplied the language-family idea later misrepresented as evidence of shared racial ancestry.
Nuremberg Laws : The 1935 Nazi laws that stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and people classified as German-blooded. They made racial ancestry a basis for citizenship and intimate life.
Race : A socially constructed system for classifying people using perceived physical traits and ancestry. The Aryan category was one historically specific racial construction, not a valid natural subdivision.
Porajmos : The genocide of Roma and Sinti people under Nazi rule and during the Second World War. Nazi racial hierarchy also targeted Roma and Sinti for persecution and mass murder.
Arthur de Gobineau : A nineteenth-century French writer who argued that racial inequality shaped the course of civilizations. His racial theories helped popularize claims of Aryan superiority in Europe.
Lebensborn : An SS program established in 1935 to support births and child placement within Nazi racial policy. It pursued the regime's vision of increasing the population it classified as racially desirable.
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