What Was the Primary Purpose of the German Racial Purity Laws

What Was the Primary Purpose of the German Racial Purity Laws

Tracing the evolution of racist beliefs in Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and showing the intellectual roots of Nazi doctrines related to racial hygiene and anti-Semitism. Includes reproductions of racist caricatures and illustrations, bibliographic references and an index. The Finns had a controversial position in Nazi racial politics, as they were considered part of the “Eastern Mongolian race” along with the Sami in traditional racial hierarchies. [82] [83] Finland, unlike Norway, did not have Lebensborn centers, although Finland had tens of thousands of German soldiers in the country. However, archival research revealed that 26 Finnish women were in contact with the Lebensborn programme for unspecified reasons. [84] The drafting of the Nuremberg Laws has often been attributed to Hans Globke. Globke co-authored several aspects of the laws, such as the ordinance that legally required Jews with non-Jewish names to adopt the additional names Israel or Sara, as well as the official legal commentary on the Reich Citizenship Law. [47] Although the laws were primarily directed against Jews,[73] other “non-Aryan” people were subject to laws and other laws dealing with racial hygiene. The term “Aryan” was never fully defined – it was too vague and ambiguous; A number of judicial and executive decisions have attempted to clarify the concept over time. Jews were, by definition, non-Aryan, because of their Semitic origin. Outside of Europe in North Africa, according to the racial theories of Alfred Rosenberg (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), some Berbers, especially the Kabyles, were to be classified as Aryan. [74] The Nazis portrayed Swedes, Africans – who are white European descendants of Dutch-speaking Boers in South Africa – and higher-ranking North/West Europeans in South America (mainly from Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina) as ideal “Aryans” with the German-speaking peoples of Greater Germany and Switzerland (the country was neutral during the war). The Roma (gypsies), who, although originally considered Aryan, were considered a threat to the Aryan race due to their miscegenation.

[75] So much has been written about the sources of Hitler`s racial ideology and other ideas that standard histories of the Third Reich and the many biographies of Adolf Hitler seem content to repeat a well-established litany of people and movements that may have influenced Hitler`s thinking. Blavatsky himself did not identify the Aryan race with the Germanic peoples. And although his racial doctrine clearly included belief in superior and inferior races and could therefore easily be abused, it did not attach importance to the domination of one race over another. He certainly did not advocate the use of force, since human racial evolution was an inevitable process that operated primarily on the basis of spiritual laws. Nevertheless, Blavatsky`s work had helped promote anti-Semitism, which is perhaps one of the reasons why his esoteric work was so quickly accepted in German circles. She made a clear distinction between the Aryan and Jewish religions. The Aryans were the most spiritual people on earth. For them, religion was an “eternal landmark.” For Jews, religion was based on a “simple calculation.” They had a “religion of hatred and wickedness towards everyone and everything external to themselves.” 45 Jewish materialism and selfishness contrasted sharply with Aryan spirituality and altruism. This dualism is dramatically repeated in Hitler in the following passage: Nordic anthropometry was used to “improve” the racial composition of the Germanized part of the population by accepting into the German population individuals deemed suitably Nordic.

[13] In October 1933, German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath granted Han Chinese and Japanese an exemption from racial laws. Moreover, in April 1935, another Nazi decree stipulated that cases of racial discrimination involving Eastern Aryans (i.e. Han Chinese and Japanese) that could endanger German – i.e. Japanese – diplomatic relations would be dealt with individually. In some cases, decisions sometimes took years, as the people concerned were unable to find a job or marry interracially, mainly because the German government preferred to avoid exceptions as much as possible. The German government often exempted more Japanese Germans than it would have liked to avoid a repeat of the controversies of 1933, and in 1934 it banned the German press from discussing racial laws when Japanese and Han Chinese were involved to avoid diplomatic problems with China or Japan. [102] Online component of the museum`s special exhibition, which deals with the history of the German eugenics movement and its influence on the racial and social goals of the National Socialists. Initially, the Japanese were still subject to German racial laws, which – with the exception of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which explicitly mentioned Jews – generally applied to all “non-Aryans.” However, since the Japanese and Chinese were given the status of “Eastern Aryans”, these racial laws were applied leniently compared to other “non-Aryans” who were not given “Aryan” status by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi German government began passing the laws after it came to power in 1933, and the Japanese government initially protested several racist incidents involving Japanese or Japanese Germans that year, which were later resolved by the Nazi high command by treating their Japanese allies leniently in these disputes.

Especially after the collapse of German-Chinese cooperation and China`s declaration of war on Germany, Chinese nationals were prosecuted in Germany. The influential Nazi anti-Semite Johann von Leers advocated excluding Japanese from the laws, both because of alleged Japanese-Aryan racial ties and to improve diplomatic relations with Japan. The State Department agreed with von Leers and tried to change the laws several times between 1934 and 1937, but other government agencies, including the Bureau of Racial Policy, opposed the change. [102] To make the definitions even more complicated, there were also people living in Germany who, according to the Nuremberg Laws, were defined neither as Germans nor as Jews, that is, people who had only one or two grandparents born into the Jewish religious community. These “mixed-race” individuals were called half-breeds. They enjoyed the same rights as “racial” Germans, but these rights were continually restricted by later laws. The Nuremberg Laws, two race-based measures that disenfranchised Jews, drafted by Adolf Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party at a congress in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935. One, the Reich Citizenship Law, revokes Jewish citizenship and calls them “subjects of state.” The other, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, generally referred to simply as the Blood Protection Act, prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or related blood.” These measures were among the first of the racist Nazi laws that culminated in the Holocaust.

Examines the interplay between social and eugenic Darwinist ideas in German policy goals for public health and well-being from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Shows how Germany`s scientific tradition in dealing with social problems influenced the more radical “solutions” developed later during the Nazi era for social and racial goals. Includes figures, bibliography and index.

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