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Nazi eugenics poster entitled "Feeble-mindedness in related families in four neighboring towns." Germany, 1935.

Nazi Racism: An Overview

Racism fueled Nazi ideology and policies. The Nazis viewed the world as being divided up into competing inferior and superior races, each struggling for survival and dominance. They believed the Jews were not a religious denomination, but a dangerous non-European “race.” Nazi racism would produce murder on an unprecedented scale.

Key Facts

  • 1

    Racists believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. In the early twentieth-century, such views on race were widely accepted in many parts of the world. In fact, race is not biologically based, it is a cultural classification of groups.

  • 2

    According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other Europeans had perceived superior physical and mental traits. They considered European peoples to be “Aryans,” descended from the ancient Indo-Europeans who settled throughout the European continent as well as in Iran and India.

  • 3

    Racial antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false scientific theories. This aspect of racism was always an integral part of Nazism.

Racists are people who believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior.

The doctrine of racism asserts that blood determines national-ethnic identity. Within a racist framework, the value of a human being is not determined by his or her individuality, but instead by membership in a so-called "racial collective nation." Many intellectuals, including scientists, have lent pseudoscientific support to racist thinking. Nineteenth century racist thinkers, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, exerted a significant influence on many in Adolf Hitler's generation.

Racism, including racial antisemitism (prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false biological theories), was always an integral part of German National Socialism (Nazism).

An antisemitic illustration from a Nazi film strip.
Antisemitism illustration from a Nazi film strip

An antisemitic illustration from a Nazi film strip. The caption, translated from German, states: "As an alien race Jews had no civil rights in the middle ages. They had to reside in a restricted section of town, in a ghetto." Place and date uncertain.

  • US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Nazis perceived all of human history as the history of a biologically determined struggle among people of different races. The Nazis held that political movements such as Marxism, communism, pacifism, and internationalism were anti-nationalist and reflected a dangerous, racially based Jewish intellectualism.

In 1931, the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state) established a Race and Settlement Office to conduct race "research" and to determine the suitability of potential spouses for members of the SS. After the Nazis came to power, they passed the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, which codified a supposedly biological definition of Jewishness.

Helene Melanie Lebel
Helene Melanie Lebel

The elder of two daughters born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Helene was raised as a Catholic in Vienna. Her father died in action during World War I when Helene was just 5 years old, and her mother remarried when Helene was 15. Known affectionately as Helly, Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After finishing her secondary education she entered law school.

1933-39: At 19 Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened during 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. After losing her trusted fox terrier, Lydi, she suffered a major breakdown. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was placed in Vienna's Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany.

1940: Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even though her condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be released. Instead, Helene's mother was informed in August that Helene had been transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.

Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg "euthanasia" center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of "acute schizophrenic excitement."

Nazi racists viewed the mentally and physically ill as blemishes upon the genetic landscape of the so-called master race and, when they reproduced, as a biological danger to the purity of the Aryan race. After careful planning and data collection during the last six months of 1939, German physicians began to murder disabled residents of institutions throughout Germany in an operation that they euphemistically called "euthanasia".

According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other northern Europeans were "Aryans," a superior race. During World War II, Nazi physicians conducted bogus medical experiments seeking to identify physical evidence of Aryan superiority and non-Aryan inferiority. Despite killing countless non-Aryan prisoners in the course of these experiments, the Nazis could not find any evidence for their theories of biological racial differences among human beings.

Once in power, the Nazis implemented racial laws and policies that deprived Jews, Black people, and Roma (Gypsies) of their rights. During World War II, the Nazi leadership set about what they referred to as an "ethnic housecleaning" in the occupied Eastern territories of Poland and the Soviet Union. This policy included the murder and annihilation of so-called enemy "races," including the genocide of European Jews and the destruction of the leadership of the Slavic peoples.

Nazi racism produced murder on an unprecedented scale.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Critical Thinking Questions

  • Despite overwhelming scientific data to the contrary, many people still believe in the superiority of certain races. Why might individuals hold onto a belief that has been discredited?
  • How can racism keep a party or political group in power?
  • What information do racists use to justify their beliefs? Jewish people are not a racial group, and yet the Nazis and others believed Jews were a racial, existential threat. How can radical beliefs, like these, be challenged and countered?
  • How can knowledge of the events in Germany and Europe before the Nazis came to power help citizens today respond to threats of genocide and mass atrocity in the world?

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