Knowra Nazi racial ideology Nazi racial ideology Nazi racial ideology was a pseudoscientific hierarchy that cast so-called Aryans, especially Germans, as superior and Jews and other groups as threats or inferior.
Scientific racism : The misuse of scientific methods and claims to classify human groups into supposedly biological hierarchies. Nazi writers presented inherited racial hierarchy as biological fact, despite lacking scientific validity.
Nuremberg Laws : A set of 1935 German laws that stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriages between Jews and people classified as German-blooded. They converted racial categories into legal definitions and restrictions.
Arthur de Gobineau : A nineteenth-century French aristocrat whose writings promoted racial hierarchy and warned of racial mixing. His racial theories contributed to European arguments later echoed by Nazi ideologues.
Adolf Hitler : The leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 and central architect of its dictatorship and genocidal policies. His political program made racial hierarchy central to Nazi rule.
Generalplan Ost : A Nazi plan for German colonization of Eastern Europe through population removal, enslavement, and mass death. It translated racial empire into plans for the large-scale displacement and exploitation of Eastern Europeans.
Antisemitism : Prejudice, hostility, or discrimination directed at Jews as Jews. The regime recast longstanding anti-Jewish hatred as a racial threat supposedly inherited by birth.
Nazi eugenics : Nazi policies aimed at controlling reproduction and population under claims of racial and hereditary improvement. It applied racial hierarchy to reproduction, sterilization, and the persecution of disabled people.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain : A British-born German writer whose racialist work portrayed Germans as heirs to an idealized Teutonic past. His writings helped popularize racial antisemitism in German nationalist circles before Nazism.
Heinrich Himmler : The head of the SS and a principal organizer of Nazi racial policy and genocide. He directed institutions that enforced racial selection, deportation, and mass murder.
Aktion T4 : The Nazi killing program that murdered people with disabilities, beginning in 1939. It applied Nazi judgments of hereditary worth to disabled people through organized murder.
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