The master race (German: Herrenrasse, also
referred to as Herrenvolk "master people")
is a concept in Nazi ideology in which the
putative Nordic or Aryan races, predominant
among Germans and other northern European
peoples, are deemed the highest in racial
hierarchy. Members of this alleged master
race were referred to as Herrenmenschen ("master
humans").
The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg believed
that the Nordic race was descended from Proto-Aryans,
who he believed had prehistorically dwelt
on the North German Plain and who had ultimately
originated from the lost continent of Atlantis.
The Nazis declared that the Nordics (now referred
to as the Germanic peoples), or Aryans as
they sometimes called them, were superior
to all other races. The Nazis believed they
were entitled to expand territorially. This
concept is known as Nordicism. The actual
policy that was implemented by the Nazis resulted
in the Aryan certificate, the one form of
the official document that was required by
the law for all citizens of the Reich was
the "Lesser Aryan certificate" (Kleiner Ariernachweis),
which could be obtained through an Ahnenpass,
which required the owner to trace her or his
lineage through baptism, birth certificates
or certified proof thereof that all grandparents
were of "Aryan descent".
The Slavs (along with Gypsies and Jews) were
defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan
Untermenschen, and were thus considered to
be a danger to the "Aryan" or Germanic master
race. According to the Nazi secret Hunger
Plan and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population
was to be removed from Central Europe through
expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination,
except for a small percentage who were deemed
to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers,
and thus suitable for Germanisation.
== Historical background ==
The Übermensch (German) ("Overman" or "Superman")
is a concept in the philosophy of German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche—he posited the Übermensch
as a goal for humanity to set for itself in
his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German:
Also Sprach Zarathustra). However, Nietzsche
never developed the concept on racial grounds.
Instead, the Übermensch "seems to be the
ideal aim of spiritual development more than
a biological goal". Nazism distorted the real
meaning behind the concept to fit its 'master
race' view.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
it was posited that the Indo-Europeans (then
generally also referred to as Aryans) made
up the highest branch of humanity because
their civilization was the most technologically
advanced. This reasoning simultaneously intertwined
with Nordicism which proclaimed the "Nordic
race" as the "purest" form of said Aryan race.
Today, this view is regarded as scientific
racism because it contradicts racial equality
by positing that one race is superior to all
other races.
=== Eugenics ===
Eugenics came to play a prominent role in
this racial thought as a way to improve and
maintain the purity of the Aryan master race.
Eugenics was a concept adhered to by many
thinkers in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, such
as Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells,
Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Madison
Grant, Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John
Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus
Pauling, and Sidney Webb. Human "dog and pony
show" type events (organized by advocates
of eugenics), where men and women appeared
on stage in swimsuits in eugenic competitions
(only Nordic Aryans were allowed to enter)
to be evaluated for their physical and mental
qualities as marriage partners, were common
throughout Europe and North America in the
1920s. The Nazis took this concept to a further
extreme by establishing a program to systematically
genetically enhance the Nordic Aryans themselves
through a program of Nazi eugenics, based
on the eugenics laws of the US state of California,
to create a super race.
=== Hierarchy ===
The modern concept of the master race in general
derives from 19th-century racial theory, which
posited a hierarchy of races based on darkness
of skin color. This 19th-century concept was
largely initially developed by Count Joseph
Arthur De Gobineau. Gobineau's basic concept,
as further refined and developed in Nazism,
places the black Indigenous Australians and
Equatorial Africans at the bottom of the hierarchy,
while the white Northern and Western Europeans
(consisting of Germans, Swedes, Icelanders,
Norwegians, Danes, British, Irish, Dutch,
Belgian and Northern French) were at the top;
olive skinned white Southern Europeans (consisting
of the Southern French, Portuguese, Spaniards,
Italians, Romanians, and Greeks, i.e., those
of what is called the Mediterranean race,
which was regarded as another sub-race of
the Caucasian race) in the upper middle ranks;
and those of the Semitic race and Hamitic
race (supposed sub-races of the Caucasian
race) in the middle ranks (it was because
the Jews, being Semites, were clever that
they were so dangerous—they had their own
plan for Jewish world domination, a conspiracy
that had to be opposed by all thoughtful Aryans,
declared the Nazis). Slavs such as Poles and
Russians were not considered Aryans; and those
of the Mongoloid race (including its offshoots
the Malayan race, the American Indian race)
and mixed-race people such as Eurasians, the
bronze Mestizos, Mulattos, Afro-Asians, and
Zambos in the lower middle ranks. However,
the Japanese were considered honorary Aryans.
In attempting to scientifically prove the
racial inferiority of Slavs, German (and Austrian)
racial scientists were forced to gloss over
their findings which consistently found that
Early Slavs were dolicocephalic and fair haired,
i.e., "Nordic", while the South Slavic "Dinaric"
sub-race was often viewed favourable. Nazis
used the term "Slavic race", and considered
Slavs to be non-Aryan The concept of a Slavic
"Untermensch" went alongside the political
goals, and was particularly aimed at Poles
and Russians. Germany's ultimate goal was
to realize their Drang nach Osten to conquer
in Europe, Ukraine's "chernozem" (black earth)
soil being a particularly desirable zone for
colonization by the "Herrenvolk" (master race).
In relation to the Nazis racial purity, author
and historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote:
In the hierarchy of Nazi racism, the "Aryans"
were the superior race, destined to rule the
world after the destruction of their racial
arch-foe, the Jews. The lesser races over
whom the Germans would rule included the Slavs
— Poles, Russians, Ukrainians. ... Hitler's
racial policy with regard to the Slavs, to
the extent that it was formulated, was "depopulation."
The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating,
except to provide the necessary continuing
supply of slave laborers."
== 'Master race' in the United States ==
In the United States, the concept of 'master
race' arose within the context of master-slave
race relations in the slavery-based society
of historical America – particularly in
the South in the mid-19th century. It was
based upon both the experience of slavery
and the pseudo-scientific justifications for
racial slavery, but also on the relations
between whites in the South and North, particularly
during the American Civil War.
Benjamin W. Leigh, representing Virginia in
the United States Senate, said in a speech
of January 19, 1836:
There has been in Virginia as earnest a desire
to abolish slavery as exists any where at
this day. It commenced with the Revolution,
and many of our ablest and most influential
men were active in recommending it, and in
devising plans for the accomplishment of it.
The Legislature encouraged and facilitated
emancipation by the owners, and many slaves
were so emancipated. The leaning of the courts
of justice was always in favorem libertatis.
This disposition continued until the impracticability
of effecting a general emancipation, without
incalculable mischief to the master race,
and danger of utter destruction to the other,
and the evils consequent on partial emancipations,
became too obvious to the Legislature, and
to the great majority of the people, to be
longer disregarded.
The Oxford English Dictionary records that
William J. Grayson used the phrase "master
race" in his poem The Hireling and the Slave
(1855):
where the phrase denotes the relation between
the white masters and negro slaves.
By 1860 Virginian author George Fitzhugh was
using the "challenging phrase "master race",
which soon came to mean considerably more
than the ordinary master-slave relationship".
Fitzhugh, along with a number of southern
writers, used the term to differentiate Southerners
from Northerners, based on the dichotomy that
Southerners were supposedly descendents of
Normans / Cavaliers whereas Northerners were
descendents of Anglo-Saxons / Puritans.In
1861, the Southern press bragged that Northern
soldiers would "encounter a master race" and
knowledge of this fact would cause Northern
soldiers' "knees to tremble". The Richmond
Whig in 1862 proclaimed that "the master race
of this continent is found in the southern
states", and in 1863 the Richmond Examiner
stated that "there are slave races born to
serve, master races born to govern".
In the works of John H. Van Evrie, a Northern
supporter of the Confederacy, the term was
interchangeable with white supremacy, notably
in White Supremacy and Negro Subordination,
Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race and (so-called)
slavery its normal condition (1861). In Subgeneation:
the theory of the normal relations of the
races; an answer to miscegenation (1864) Van
Evrie created the words "subgen" to describe
what he considered to be the "inferior races"
and "subgeneation" to describe the ‘normal’
relation of such inferior races to whites,
something which he considered to be the "very
corner-stone of democracy"; but these words
never entered the dictionary.
The racial term Untermensch originates from
the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922
book The Revolt Against Civilization: The
Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted
by the Nazis from that book's German version
Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen
(1925). An advocate of the U.S. immigration
laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard
wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed
by "colored" peoples to white civilization,
with his most famous book The Rising Tide
of Color Against White World-Supremacy in
1920. Alfred Rosenberg was the leading Nazi
who attributed the concept of the East-European
"under man" to Stoddard. As the Nazi Party's
chief racial theorist, Rosenberg oversaw the
construction of a human racial "ladder" that
justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies.
Referring to Russian communists, Rosenbeg
wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts
(1930) that "this is the kind of human being
that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under
man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen'
bezeichnete."]
== Nordicism ==
The origins of the Nazi version of the theory
of the master race were in the 19th-century
racial theories of Count Joseph Arthur De
Gobineau, who argued that cultures degenerated
when distinct races mixed. It was believed
at this time that the peoples of Southern
Europe were racially mixed with non-European
Moors from across the Mediterranean Sea, while
the peoples of Northern Europe and Western
Europe remained pure. Proponents of the Nordic
theory further argued that Nordic peoples
had developed an innate toughness and determination
due to the harsh, challenging climate in which
they evolved.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was one
of the earliest proponents of a theory presenting
a hierarchical racial model of history, attributing
civilisational primacy to the "white races"
who gained their sensitivity and intelligence
by refinement in the rigorous north.
The highest civilisation and culture, apart
from the Ancient Indians and Egyptians, are
found exclusively among the white races; and
even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste
or race is fairer in colour than the rest
and has, therefore, evidently immigrated,
for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and
the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this
is because necessity is the mother of invention
because those tribes that emigrated early
to the north and there gradually became white,
had to develop all their intellectual powers
and invent and perfect all the arts in their
struggle with need, want and misery, which
in their many forms were brought about by
the climate. This they had to do in order
to make up for the parsimony of nature and
out of it all came their high civilisation.
Despite this, he was adamantly against differing
treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery,
and supported the abolitionist movement in
the United States. He describes the treatment
of "[our] innocent black brothers whom force
and injustice have delivered into [the slave-master's]
devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest
pages of mankind's criminal record".Hans Frank,
Hitler's personal lawyer, stated that Hitler
carried a copy of Schopenhauer's book The
World as Will and Representation with him
wherever he went throughout World War I.
The postulated superiority of these people
was said to make them born leaders, or a "master
race". Other authors included Guido von List,
his associate Lanz von Liebenfels, and the
British-born German racial theorist Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, all of whom felt that
the white race in general and Germanic peoples
in particular were superior to others, and
that given the purification of both the white
race and the German people from the other
races which were "polluting" them, a new millenarian
age of Aryan god-men would arrive.Nazi policy
stressed the superiority of the Germanic Ubermenschen
(superhuman) Nordic race, a sub-race of the
white Caucasian race European population defined
by anthropometric models of racial difference.
The Nordic race was said to comprise only
the Germanic peoples: Scandinavians and the
rest of the Nordic countries (Norwegians,
Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Faroese), ethnic
Germans (including Austrians, Banat Swabians,
as well as Sudeten, Baltic and Volga Germans),
Alemannic Swiss, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers,
the Dutch, Flemings, Afrikaners, Frisians
and the English.
The Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther
first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic
book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen.
The fact that Germans were not purely Nordic
was acknowledged by Günther in his book Rassenkunde
des deutschen Volkes (1922) ("Racial Science
of the German People"), in which he described
the German people as being made up of all
five of his European racial categories: Nordic,
Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic.
Most official Nazi comments on the Nordic
race were based on Günther's works, and Alfred
Rosenberg presented Günther with a medal
for his work in anthropology.
Although the physical ideal of these racial
theorists was typically the tall, fair-haired
and light-eyed Nordic individual, such theorists
accepted the fact that a considerable variety
of hair and eye colour existed within the
racial categories they recognised. For example,
Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials had dark
hair and were still considered members of
the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine,
because the determination of an individual's
racial type depended on a preponderance of
many characteristics in an individual rather
than on just one defining feature.Hitler and
Himmler planned to use the SS as the basis
for the racial "regeneration" of Europe following
the final victory of Nazism. The SS was to
be a racial elite chosen on the basis of "pure"
Nordic qualities.Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936)
was an Italian anthropologist of the early
twentieth century, best known for his opposition
to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity
of ancient Mediterranean peoples. His concept
of the Mediterranean race became important
to the modelling of racial difference in the
early twentieth century.
== Aryanism and Nazism ==
The term Aryan derives from the Sanskrit word
(ā́rya), which derived from arya, the original
Indo-Iranian autonym. Also, the word Iran
is the Persian word for land/place of the
Aryan (see also Iranian peoples).
Following the ideas of Gobineau and others,
the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg determined
that these people, who, he claimed, were originally
from Atlantis, were a dynamic warrior people
who dwelt in northern climates on the North
German Plain in prehistoric times, from which
they migrated southeast by riding their chariots,
eventually reaching Ukraine, Iran, and then
India. They were supposed to be the ancestors
of the ancient Germanic tribes, who shared
their warrior values. Rosenberg claimed that
Christianity was an alien Semitic slave-morality
which was inappropriate for the warrior Aryan
master race and he thus supported a melange
of aspects of Hindu Vedic and Zoroastrian
teachings (both of these religions having
been organised by Aryans), along with pre-Christian
European Odinistic paganism, which he also
considered distinctively Aryan in character.In
Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935
forbade sexual relations and marriage between
an "Aryan" and a "non-Aryan" in order to maintain
the purity of the Aryan race. Such relations
became a punishable crime known as Rassenschande
or "racial shame". The League of German Girls
was particularly regarded as instructing girls
to avoid Rassenschande, which was treated
with particular importance for young females.
Aryans found guilty of this crime could face
incarceration in a concentration camp, while
non-Aryans could face the death penalty. The
Nazis recognized the Germanic people as the
master race, and several policies were implemented
in order to improve and maintain the Germanic-Nordic
ubermenschen Aryan "master race", including
the practice of eugenics. In order to eliminate
"defective" citizens, the T-4 Euthanasia Program
was administered by Karl Brandt in order to
rid the country of the intellectually disabled
or those born with genetic deficiencies, as
well as those deemed racially inferior. Additionally,
a programme of compulsory sterilisation was
undertaken which resulted in forced operations
being performed on hundreds of thousands of
individuals. Many of these policies are generally
seen as being related to what eventually became
known as the Holocaust.The Nazis also undertook
measures to increase the number of Nordics
in Germany. The Lebensborn program was only
open to German women who fit the Nordic profile.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the
Nazis took young Nordic-looking Polish children
who were classified as being descended from
ethnic German settlers in order to determine
whether or not they were "racially valuable".
If that were the case, the young children
were taken back to these Lebensborn houses
so they could be raised as Germans.In Nazi
Germany, there existed an official document
which certified that its owner was Aryan,
the so-called Aryan certificate that could
also be obtained by citizens of other countries.
It states in the section Racial Tenet (Rassegrundsatz):
In line with national socialist thinking which
does full justice to all other peoples, there
is never the expression of superior or inferior,
but alien racial admixtures.
For the Greater Aryan certificate people had
to prove that reaching back to January 1,
1800 "none of their paternal nor their maternal
ancestors had Jewish or colored blood" (SS
officers had to prove this reaching back to
1750).
== Mediterranean race ==
The fact that the Mediterranean race was responsible
for the most important of ancient western
civilisations was a problem for the promoters
of Nordic superiority. According to Giuseppe
Sergi, the Mediterranean race was the "greatest
race of the world" and was singularly responsible
for the most accomplished civilisations of
ancient times, including those of Mesopotamia,
Persia, Egypt, Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage,
and Rome. The Mediterranean race was also
a major influence to the outside world in
the modern era: during the 16th century, Spain
and Portugal established the first global
empires in Western history, setting both nations
in the highest level of political and economic
powers in Europe.
C. G. Seligman also stated that "it must,
I think, be recognised that the Mediterranean
race has actually more achievements to its
credit than any other race, since it is responsible
for by far the greater part of Mediterranean
civilisation, certainly before 1000 BC (and
probably much later), and so shaped not only
the Aegean cultures, but those of Western
as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean
lands, while the culture of their near relatives,
the Hamitic pre-dynastic Egyptians, formed
the basis of that of Egypt."The Nazis explained
this by pointing out that the original Latins
and Greeks were Indo-European Nordic tribes
that had migrated into Italy and Greece, respectively.
The Nazis also claimed that the Spanish and
Portuguese empires were examples of Nordic
power since, at the time, their governments
were run by the descendants of the Germanic
Visigoths that had invaded earlier.
However, they did admit that the masses during
these four civilizations were Mediterranean.
And Germans of all European races were classified
as Aryan.
== Master race in fiction ==
Aryan master race ideology was common throughout
the educated and literate strata of the Western
world until after World War II. Such theories
were commonplace in early-20th century fantasy
literature.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the original Buck
Rogers stories and newspaper cartoons, Buck
Rogers, in his adventures in the 25th century
that take place on Earth, fights for Aryan-Americans
from the liberated zone around Niagara, New
York, against the Red Mongol Empire, a Chinese
empire of the future which rules most of North
America.In the 1930s, both educational and
storybooks for children in Germany taught
their readers about the master race. In the
Sun Koh science fiction series, the protagonist
Koh says things like "My forefathers were
Aryan", and in a story about Atlantis, he
says, "If our Atlantis once again rises out
of the sea, then we will get from there the
blond, steel-hard men with the pure blood
and will create with them the master race,
which will finally rule the earth." The German
writer Michael Ende, who was born in 1929
and grew up reading such books, wrote his
classic novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine
Driver in the 1950s, as a way of opposing
the Nazi propaganda he was taught. Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung writer Julia Voss wrote
a book on Jim Button, uncovering Ende's many
references to Nazi symbols in that book. Voss
shows how Ende upends the Nazi belief that
Atlantis was the original home of the Aryan
race by creating his own submerged city and
making it rise, but not to restore Aryan master-race
rule over the earth, rather it becomes a multi-racial
paradise with Jim Button, who is black and
a descendant of the Magi Caspar, as its king.In
the 1948 film Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, one
of the central characters, Brandon Shaw, is
a firm believer in the master race ideology.In
Doctor Who, the Doctor's frequent enemies,
the Daleks, consider themselves a master race
who must purge the universe of all others;
Terry Nation explicitly modeled them on the
Nazis. In the 2009 special The End of Time,
when the Master transforms the entire human
race into copies of himself, he claims that
there is no human race, but only "the Master
race".
In the Harry Potter series, while the parallels
were not originally intentional, there is
much similarity between Voldemort's pureblood
ideology and the master race ideology of the
Nazis, with wizards being "pure" and anyone
with Muggle (non-wizard) blood being considered
"half-blood" or "mudblood", a word treated
the same way a racial slur would be treated
in the real world (Neo-Nazis call non-white
people mud people).
== Footnotes ==
== 
See also ==
Model minority
