What 'races' were the Germans classified as by the Nazis?

[George L Gregory]

The Nordic race, the Alpine race, the Dinaric race, the East Baltic race and the Mediterranean race. Am I missing any other races?

[Hans1906]

Hi George,

the target-leading German-language terms are, among others, "Rassenlehre", and "Rassenhygiene".

"Nationalsozialistische Rassenhygiene": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationals ... senhygiene
(The article is also av. in English, somewhat shortened)

You certainly already know it well enough, but it might be interesting for people who are not so well-read on this topic here in the forum.
There are plenty of other relevant references online, please spare me the links...

As is almost always the case, I consider your questions to be purely provocative, in your expectation of wrong answers.
But as always, that's just my very personal opinion, please don't take it amiss.


Hans
P.S. Quickly spouted "one-liners" are frowned upon in German-language Internet forums, and not without reason.

[George L Gregory]

Hi George,

the target-leading German-language terms are, among others, "Rassenlehre", and "Rassenhygiene".

"Nationalsozialistische Rassenhygiene": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationals ... senhygiene
(The article is also av. in English, somewhat shortened)

You certainly already know it well enough, but it might be interesting for people who are not so well-read on this topic here in the forum.
There are plenty of other relevant references online, please spare me the links...

As is almost always the case, I consider your questions to be purely provocative, in your expectation of wrong answers.
But as always, that's just my very personal opinion, please don't take it amiss.


Hans
P.S. Quickly spouted "one-liners" are frowned upon in German-language Internet forums, and not without reason.

What the hell is provocative about asking what races the Nazis regarded the Germans belonged to exactly?

[Frischluft]

One is missing: the fälische Rasse (Phalian race, Faelid), which Hans F. K. Günther named after the northwestern German region of Westphalia, as it is "probably the best conservation area".¹

The "images of German races" were created to teach school children (see attachments). The description of the Phalian race translates as:

Shapes: Very tall, bulky; long-headed, broad-faced; nose quite narrow; hair wavy or curly.
Colours: Light, hair blond, eyes blue to grey, skin rosy white.

Richard Walther Darré cited Bismarck and Hindenburg as examples of the Phalian race.²

[George L Gregory]

Were the top leaders ever formally racially classified?

[ManfredV]

I think it wasn't ever published. Goebbels was handicaped, Göring was a fat "baroque" personality. Hitler didn't really knew woh his anvestors were. In fact they were was a typical bavarian countryman.
An illegal joke was: blond wie Hitler, schlank wie Göring, sportlich und groß wie Goebbels.

[George L Gregory]

I think it wasn't ever published. Goebbels was handicaped, Göring was a fat "baroque" personality. Hitler didn't really knew woh his anvestors were. In fact they were was a typical bavarian countryman.
An illegal joke was: blond wie Hitler, schlank wie Göring, sportlich und groß wie Goebbels.

Goebbels privately in his diaries mocked the racial concepts of Nazism.

Hitler did know who his ancestors were and no one in his family doubted that his paternal grandfather was the guy who was later presumed to be his father’s father. There was incest in Hitler’s family and his parents needed special permission to get married because they were deemed to be too closely related.

[Hans1906]

The actual origin of our family was Friesland and Westphalia.

The Westphalian faction of the family were and are all of the same build, very tall, huge heads, all are blond and blue-eyed.
The Frisian faction is rather smaller, a bit "stunted", not quite as "noble" as the Westphalians, but also tough in every respect.

The Westphalians have always been large landowners, the poor Frisians tended to be robber barons and pirates, so everyone found their own fate.

The Frisians were closer to the water, had more contact with other "races" from all over the world, it was good for them, diversity refreshes old blood, even today...

The topic is as old as my red "Celtic" beard, but always very amusing!


Hans

[Hans1906]

Racial tendencies were not alien to me and to us in our German childhood years, one looked down on "Gypsies", on "Jews", on "Blacks".

These people were practically no longer present in Germany after 1945, exterminated before 1945.
We children had no contact with "such" people, we grew up in a "straight German" environment.

There was the black ice cream seller who walked around with his box at every festival and offered "warm ice".
For us an exotic person, the sweating black man was "exotic", the man was found funny, exotic.

Jewish people were non-existent, albeit in the background, as "profiteers" and "string pullers", but not visible to the public.
These fellow citizens were mocked and sneered at behind closed doors, and we children adopted these old prejudices.

Late at night at every festival, the drunks would chant "Die Fahne hoch...!" and the maimed veterans would clapping.
They were strange childhood years, a lot of silence, a lot of subliminal fear and hatred, a lot of old ideas.
A child didn't understand that, maybe in later years, if at all...

When I see parades of the "Leibstandarte" even today, I get chills down my spine, a mixture of fascination and disgust, in exactly that order.
You internalize what you grew up with, it's exactly like that.

All that German shit is internalized, you'll never get rid of it.


Hans
P.S. Just look at the "clicks" for this topic, the "pack" loves and waits for sensations, normal.

[Hans1906]

A little reminder:

I showed some old German propaganda posters from my collection to my uncle, the former NPEA Jungmann.

The uncle, a seasoned man, a well-known lawyer and notary said to me:

"In view of your old posters, some old comrades would still stand to attention, where do you find posters like that..?"

The uncle was born in 1933, he had all the old indoctrination deep inside him, but it broke out at that moment.
Far be it from me to slander my mother's older brother, but the man was back to the old ideology in a minute.

The merciless drill of this elite school still slumbered subliminally in the man, decades later.
It was there that I realized what the Nazis had done to these young people, not a particularly nice experience.
Worlds from our family opened up to me that were never talked about.

You may smile at that, but it was only after that day that I understood my uncle, and his relationship with his family, and his only younger sister.
His two children know nothing about their father's history, their mother made sure of that.


Hans

[George L Gregory]

Hitler himself said in 1930s that the German people should not be judged by their racial appearances but by what the best racial elements can provide for the German nation.

Hitler disapproved of such comparisons. He especially opposed reference to physical contrasts of stature, coloring, or physiognomy among German ethnic groups. In 1930 he told an aid, “Discussions about the race problem will only divide the German people further, incite them against one another, atomize them, and in this way make them inconsequential with respect to foreign affairs.” He admonished senior officials of the party to avoid the subject of ethnic diversity in speeches and articles: “Everything that unifies and welds the classes together must be brought forth, what divides them, what re-animates old prejudices, must be avoided. . . .They are the surest way to destroy a community.” He remarked that people should be selected for leadership roles “not according to outward appearance, but by demonstrating inward ability”. Goebbels, himself a diminutive man with a slight limp, recorded in his diary in October 1937, “Discussed race policy with Dr. Gross. I reproached him for our flawed standards for making selections. According to them, practically every officer today would be dismissed.”

Richard Tedor, Hitler’s Revolution, pages 41-42.

https://archive.org/details/hitlers-rev ... 7/mode/1up

The source Tedor used is:

Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionär, pages 422, 423, 424.

I can’t find out too much about Tedor as a historian. Does anyone know of the quotes above in the original German with sources?

[George L Gregory]

A lot of people seem to think that the Nazis believed in pure races or people and that the Germans were the most pure. That is nonsense.

Dr Ernst Brandis, a guy who commented about the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German people on 18 October 1935, defined "German blood" which was used as a way of obtaining Reich citizenship after the Nuremberg Laws were announced said:

The German people is no unitary race, rather it is composed of members of different races (of the Nordic, Phalian, Dinaric, Alpine, Mediterranean, East-Elbian race) and mixtures between these. The blood of all these races and their mixtures, which thus is found in the German people, represents 'German blood'.

Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, page 92.