Volksgemeinschaft

Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazi ideal of a racially defined German national community that subordinated individual interests and excluded people deemed outside it.

Nazi racial policy: The laws and practices through which the Nazi regime classified people by race and denied rights to those it persecuted. It gave the community’s racial boundaries legal and administrative force.
Holocaust: The systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The regime’s exclusionary racial order culminated in the genocide of European Jews.
Völkisch movement: A German nationalist and cultural movement that emphasized ethnic belonging, ancestry, and an idealized rural past. Its ethnic conception of the people supplied a major ideological precursor.
Civic nationalism: A conception of national belonging based primarily on shared citizenship and political principles rather than ancestry. It contrasts with Volksgemeinschaft’s racial test for membership.
Nuremberg Laws: The 1935 Nazi laws that stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and people classified as German-blooded. They translated exclusion from the national community into explicit law.
Persecution of Roma and Sinti: The Nazi persecution and mass murder of Roma and Sinti, whom the regime classified as racial outsiders. Roma and Sinti were excluded from the imagined community and subjected to racial persecution.
German nationalism: Political movements and ideas that promoted German national identity, unity, or self-determination. Volksgemeinschaft recast national unity as a racially exclusive community.
Liberalism: A political tradition that emphasizes individual rights, legal equality, and limits on state power. Its protection of individual rights conflicts with the subordination demanded by Nazi communal ideology.
Gleichschaltung: The Nazi regime’s coordination of German institutions and organizations under party control, especially from 1933 to 1934. Political coordination suppressed independent institutions that could resist enforced unity.
Aktion T4: The Nazi program of forced euthanasia that murdered people with disabilities and psychiatric conditions, beginning in 1939. The regime’s vision of a healthy national body justified murdering people it deemed burdensome.

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NazismRelated: It promised solidarity for those classified as German while legitimizing exclusion and persecution.