Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

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George L Gregory
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Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#1

Post by George L Gregory » 31 Jan 2022, 16:42

According to National Socialist racial doctrine, all European peoples belonged to the family of Aryans and were thus "fundamentally equivalent", that is, recognized as equal before the laws.
Diemut Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, page 63.

I thought Slavic people were considered to be non-Aryans.

I've also read that Adolf Hitler regarded the Italians to be racially mixed with blacks, the Czechs to be racially mixed with Mongoloids, etc.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#2

Post by Tapani K. » 31 Jan 2022, 20:08

The Nazis also regarded Swedish-speaking Finns as Germanic and therefore superior (more Aryan?) to Finnish-speaking Finns, who speak a Finno-Ugric language.

regards,
Tapani K.


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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#3

Post by Totenkomf » 31 Jan 2022, 20:12

Tapani K. wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 20:08
The Nazis also regarded Swedish-speaking Finns as Germanic and therefore superior (more Aryan?) to Finnish-speaking Finns, who speak a Finno-Ugric language.

regards,
Tapani K.
Yes the case of the Finnish was complicated being Aryan or not...
"Befehl ist Befehl"

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#4

Post by Hans1906 » 31 Jan 2022, 21:31

Nonsense, all the Nazis were at least 190 centimeters tall, wore jet black uniforms, two Luger pistols on their belts, loaded through, and conversed in jarring German:

Samatou: "Hitlers Nazis mit Migrationshintergrund"


Georg Schramm (The German Officer Pér Se)


:lol:


Hans
Last edited by Hans1906 on 31 Jan 2022, 21:49, edited 1 time in total.
The paradise of the successful lends itself perfectly to a hell for the unsuccessful. (Bertold Brecht on Hollywood)

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#5

Post by Totenkomf » 31 Jan 2022, 21:41

Hans1906 wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 21:31
Nonsense, all the Nazis were at least 190 centimeters tall, wore jet black uniforms, two Luger pistols on their belts, loaded through, and conversed in jarring German:

Samatou: "Hitlers Nazis mit Migrationshintergrund"



Hans
Nearly every Nazi: besides Hitler, Goebbels, nearly every NSDAP-Leiter, and SS-Officer.
"Befehl ist Befehl"

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#6

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 12:30

Totenkomf wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 20:12
Tapani K. wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 20:08
The Nazis also regarded Swedish-speaking Finns as Germanic and therefore superior (more Aryan?) to Finnish-speaking Finns, who speak a Finno-Ugric language.

regards,
Tapani K.
Yes the case of the Finnish was complicated being Aryan or not...
In 1935, the Nazis offered a definition of 'Aryan' which included Finns as being Aryans. However, it was not considered to be sufficient because it also included non-Europeans:
The Aryans (also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten) are one of the three branches of the Caucasian (white race);they are divided into the western (European), that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern (Asiatic) Aryans, that is the Indian (Hindu) and Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd). Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of two other races, namely the Mongolian (yellow) and the Negroid (black) races; 2. the members of the two other branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites (Jews, Arabs) and Hamites (Berbers). The Finns and the Hungarians belong to the Mongoloid race; but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of the European Volk are Aryans...
Nevertheless:
In 1942, Hitler decreed that the Finns, at least, were definitely “racially related Germanic neighboring peoples.” There is no indication, however, that this determination was based on new racial-scientific findings.
Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof Genealogy, Racial Science, And The Final Solution", page 10.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#7

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 12:32

Majer actually explained how and why the Nazis discriminated against the Slavs:
The best example of the shift in meaning that occurred in the conception of völkisch inequality toward that of a political principle is seen in the position of the Eastern European peoples in the National Socialist scheme things. From the outset, Hitler's particular hatred, and that of the Nazi leadership, was reserved for the so-called Slavic peoples, who were considered inferior and intended for the future slave class of Europe. From a purely racial standpoint, however, this was incapable of satisfactory proof, since even according to German ethnology it was impossible to speak of a Slavic race. According to National Socialist doctrine, justification for discrimination against the Slavs lay rather in the "ethnic threat" presented by their fecundity. This is why Hitler quite early sketched precise outlines for the future "depopulation policy" in the East, which foresaw the annihilation of these peoples and which was later carried out virtually to the letter by the civil administration and the police forces. Such arguments already imply that the treatment of the "non-Germans" under special law was actually justifiable only from the standpoint of (population) policy; nevertheless, the National Socialist leadership clung fast to the concept of racial value or lack thereof, in an attempt to concoct their policy on the basis of absolutely untenable racial arguments.

Where members of neutral or allied nations in (southern) Europe were concerned, of course, it was not possible to speak of inferiority; therefore, these peoples were either classified as "Southern Slavs," as "Dinarians" and thus as racially related; or else they were simply not counted among the Slavs at all. Members of enemy states, by contrast, were turned into "racial foes" as a means of justifying their classification under special law. Thus Hitler simply insinuated that the Czechs were (racially) inferior (descended from "Mongoloid tribes"), since he desired to rid himself of them in order to incorporate "Bohemia and Moravia" into the Reich; also "inferior" were Ukrainians, east-European Jews, Soviet Russians, Bulgarians, Lithuanians, and members of other Eastern European peoples. Of course, this was nothing more than sloganeering and from a racial perspective not acceptable as justification even in the Nazi sense of the word. More imprecise than anything else was the position of the Soviet Russians in the Nazi racial scheme. Since they were declared to be political mortal enemies (as Bolshevists) while simultaneously being considered the incarnation of the racial foe (Jewry), Bolshevism and Jewry were flatly equated with one another, referred to as the "Jewish-Bolshevist threat," and made out to the very quintessence of all types of inferiority.

Analogously, no convincing race-theoretical explanation could be found to justify the discrimination against Poles. According to National Socialist racial doctrine, all European peoples belonged to the family of the Aryans and were thus fundamentally "racially equivalent," that is, recognized as equal before the law. Discrimination against Poles was justified, however, because, like all Slavs, they represented a major völkisch and racial threat to Germany. Yet here, too, such reasoning was merely pretext. In his early statements on the Slavs, Hitler did not even mention the Poles, because at that time Poland was signatory to the Non-Aggression Treaty of 1934, and its position in the National Socialist scheme of conquest was not yet settled. The "ethnic threat" posed by the Poles was not discovered until the invasion of Poland. The placement of the Poles under rule of special law was done from fundamentally political motives, which were considerably intensified by the antipathy toward the Poles that, for reasons both political (voting disputes) [Abstimmungskampf] in the East and West Prussia, fighting in West Prussia and Upper Silesia, and the activities of the Freikorps) and religious, had been present in the eastern part of Germany in a particular intense form since 1918. The main reason, however, was that the Nazi leadership considered the Poles to be the most dangerous of all peoples in Eastern Europe on account of their staunch insistence upon their national rights and identity as a people. The race-political grounds for hatred of the Poles were merely the ideological mask justifying the National Socialist policy of violent force.

The political bias for the systemically fomented hatred of and malice against Poles reveals itself in the thesis, invented ex post facto, of their "threat to the community," which then became the dominant argument in both theory and practice. According to this, the Poles had to be excluded from the European community of rights on account of their "Germanophobia" and their political incompetence and "lack of culture." In contrast with this political argument, neither the racial window dressing of Nazi propaganda that commenced in 1939, according to which the Poles were "racial foes" with regard to whom restraints were not to be observed, nor the elaborate attempts of the Race Policy Office to set up a racial classification of the Poles achieved much of an echo.

Finally, the political basis for the unequal treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe is seen in the about-face of the Nazi leadership when the fortunes of war were reversed and the labor of the "non-Germans" was required ever more urgently. On instructions from the Central Office of Propaganda of the NSDAP dated February 15, 1943, all chiefs of propaganda of the Reich Gaue were obliged, "within the frame of the war against Russia, for which the energies of all the peoples of Europe are required," to cease insulting the "Eastern nations" either directly or indirectly, and no longer characterize them as "beasts," "subhumans," and so forth, in order to gain their aid "in the struggle against Bolshevism.
Ibid, pages 62-64.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#8

Post by Totenkomf » 01 Feb 2022, 12:36

George L Gregory wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:30
Totenkomf wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 20:12
Tapani K. wrote:
31 Jan 2022, 20:08
The Nazis also regarded Swedish-speaking Finns as Germanic and therefore superior (more Aryan?) to Finnish-speaking Finns, who speak a Finno-Ugric language.

regards,
Tapani K.
Yes the case of the Finnish was complicated being Aryan or not...
In 1935, the Nazis offered a definition of 'Aryan' which included Finns as being Aryans. However, it was not considered to be sufficient because it also included non-Europeans:
The Aryans (also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten) are one of the three branches of the Caucasian (white race);they are divided into the western (European), that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern (Asiatic) Aryans, that is the Indian (Hindu) and Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd). Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of two other races, namely the Mongolian (yellow) and the Negroid (black) races; 2. the members of the two other branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites (Jews, Arabs) and Hamites (Berbers). The Finns and the Hungarians belong to the Mongoloid race; but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of the European Volk are Aryans...
Nevertheless:
In 1942, Hitler decreed that the Finns, at least, were definitely “racially related Germanic neighboring peoples.” There is no indication, however, that this determination was based on new racial-scientific findings.
Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof Genealogy, Racial Science, And The Final Solution", page 10.
Well the documents speak value: so case closed?. Europeans were Aryans..
"Befehl ist Befehl"

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#9

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 12:46

Totenkomf wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:36
Well the documents speak value: so case closed?. Europeans were Aryans..
Not quite.

There were arguments for example about Hungarians.

What about the way Poles, Russians and other Slavs were treated by the Nazis?
In contrast, sexual relations between Germans and members of Eastern European nations were relentlessly prosecuted by the Gestapo on grounds of the "risk for the racial integrity of the German nation," and as usual only two sanctions were apples: committal to a concentration camp if the foreign offender was capable of being Germanized, or execution ("special treatment"). Preventive detention was demanded in the case of German offenders. This concerned above all Polish workers, the first to arrive in the Reich, but also Polish prisoners of war, over whom hung the threat of committal to a concentration camp, at least provisionally. A leaflet on the "duties of civilian workers . . . of Polish nationality" confirmed explicitly that the death sentence would be meted out for the offense of sexual intercourse with personals of German blood. Russians ("Eastern workers"), Czechs, Serbs, and others later came to be included in this category.
Majer, pages 181-182.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#10

Post by Totenkomf » 01 Feb 2022, 12:49

George L Gregory wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:46
Totenkomf wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:36
Well the documents speak value: so case closed?. Europeans were Aryans..
Not quite.

There were arguments for example about Hungarians.

What about the way Poles, Russians and other Slavs were treated by the Nazis?
In contrast, sexual relations between Germans and members of Eastern European nations were relentlessly prosecuted by the Gestapo on grounds of the "risk for the racial integrity of the German nation," and as usual only two sanctions were apples: committal to a concentration camp if the foreign offender was capable of being Germanized, or execution ("special treatment"). Preventive detention was demanded in the case of German offenders. This concerned above all Polish workers, the first to arrive in the Reich, but also Polish prisoners of war, over whom hung the threat of committal to a concentration camp, at least provisionally. A leaflet on the "duties of civilian workers . . . of Polish nationality" confirmed explicitly that the death sentence would be meted out for the offense of sexual intercourse with personals of German blood. Russians ("Eastern workers"), Czechs, Serbs, and others later came to be included in this category.
Majer, pages 181-182.
Well Slavs were not Aryans According to the Nazis?
"Befehl ist Befehl"

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#11

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 12:50

Totenkomf wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:49
Well Slavs were not Aryans According to the Nazis?
Slavs were Aryans according to Nazi ideology. However, the Nazis regarded the Slavic people to be racially inferior to the Germanic people.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#12

Post by Totenkomf » 01 Feb 2022, 12:54

That much I know about, that the Nazis viewed the Slavs as racially inferior. so Aryans were atleast:

Germans, Other Germanic People (Volksdeutche), Nordea People, etc.
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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#13

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 12:58

Totenkomf wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 12:54
That much I know about, that the Nazis viewed the Slavs as racially inferior. so Aryans were atleast:

Germans, Other Germanic People (Volksdeutche), Nordea People, etc.
The Nazi Karl Frank defined a 'German' in 1939 as:
Whoever professes himself to be a member of the German nation is a member of the German nation, provided that this profession is confirmed by certain facts, such as language, upbringing, culture, etc. Persons of alien blood, particularly Jews, are never Germans. . . . Because professing to be a member of the German nation is of vital significance, even someone who is partly or completely of another race—Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian, or Polish, for example—can be considered a German. Any more precise elaboration of the term "German national" is not possible given current relationships.
And:
Leading racist scholars like Hans Günther rejected the idea that there was an Aryan race. For them, 'Aryan' was a term that belonged to linguistics. As a result, the term 'Aryan' was neither used in the Nuremberg racial laws nor in many other relevant Nazi laws starting in the second half of 1933. Historically, the European idea of Aryanism had emerged from structural similarities between Indian and European languages that were discovered in the late eighteenth century. Through much of the nineteenth century, the theory of an Indo-Germanic language spurred imaginings that there were also relations of blood among most European and Indian peoples; and some, such as the Iranians, who were in between. The 'Aryan' family of people was supposed to exclude, for example, 'Semites' like Arabs and Jews and 'Asian' peoples like Turks, Hungarians or Sami (Lapps). The Aryan myth had been in decline since the late nineteenth century, but, on a popular level, ideas persisted that relatively close relations existed among certain (European) races, and so did the (often non-official) use of the term 'Aryan'. Hitler used the term in his book, Mein Kampf, without defining it or reflecting on it. In his later speeches he talked about "Aryan peoples," Aryan peoples and races" and "European-Aryan peoples" interchangeably.

Explications of who was supposed to be Aryan, if that concept was used, differed slightly. Addressing the diplomatic corps in 1934, Minister of the Interior Frick stated that all "non-Jewish members of all European peoples" were Aryan. Poles were defined as Aryan, but "gypsies" and "Negroes" were not. The view that Poles were Aryans can be found in documents of occupation authorities, and non-Jewish Poles were told as much. The former applied to Slavs in general — Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Serbs — whom earlier theorists also considered Aryan.

The fact that 'Aryan' was a popular buzzword, but expressed no definite concept, is underlined by racists' widely varying and ambivalent assessments of Slavs. Slavs, of course, were not supposed to be a race. Even important Nazi politicians-cum-ideologues did not agree on how to evaluate them: Himmler, who wanted Germany to lead a struggle against Asia, advocated radical policies against Slavs and racial screenings of them, but he also had Slavic (and Asiatic) ethnicities recruited iinto the Waffen-SS; whereas Rosenberg viewed certain Slavic peoples as potential allies who should be allowed a separate, appropriate, segregated and dependent development. Erich Koch had praised the "young peoples of the East" prior to 1933, even proposing "racial mixing" between Prussians and Slavs, and he saw positive aspects of Soviet society as late as 1939-41, before turning to brutal racist oppression as the Reich Commissar for Ukraine. Like Hitler, many Nazi leaders had said little (and little negative) about Slavs in their early writings. The general view in Germany was that the Slavs were a mixture of races.

The Polish people were supposed to consist of the same races as the Germans, although in a different mixture. Russians were said to have also incorporated Mongol blood. Anti-Slav prejudices were old and widespread in Germany but they were also displayed, for example, by Italian diplomats. Yet some scholars argue that in German academia views hostile to Slavs were only frequently expressed. Apparently, no general Nazi guidelines for Slavic philology or eastern European history existed. In a 1944 propaganda brochure entitled "What are we fighting for?" the Supreme Command of the Ground Forces omitted explicit anti-Slavic arguments, listing Jews, Bolshevism, the USA and England as Germany's main enemies.

Given all these inconsistencies, old prejudices — also cultivated by intellectuals — influenced German policies strongly. According to these attitudes, Slavs were uncultured, stupid, alcoholic, disorderly and undisciplined. During the Weimar Republic they were also portrayed as treacherous, brutal and revengeful. In Germany after 1939, when large numbers of Polish forced laborers were used, Poles were portrayed as lazy, undisciplined, envious, hateful, revengeful, and as only pretending to be subservient, and their country was described as pre-industrial. Even to writer Heinrich Böll, an admirer of Russian literature, Russia appeared "sad and vast and demonic, the country without fences."

Racists held that Slavs were incapable of sustained state-building and of bringing order to environments. On the one hand, the old stereotypes allowed for the publication shortly after the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty in 1939 of a relatively respect brochure on Soviet Russia that described the Russians' national character as natural, friendly, pious, down-to-earth, passionate, adaptable, and ambitious though non-achieving; but on the other hand it did emphasize some negative elements of prejudice by adding that Russians were also passive, melancholic and devoid of individual personalities. And even during the ongoing German war against Poland in 1939, Hitler publicly praised the bravery of Polish soldiers. Thus, Aryanism and, so, racist thinking itself, to a degree had room for such contradictory evaluations. Nevertheless, after 1943 calls for treating the Slavs well, and the 'Europe versus Bolshevism' propaganda, were rarely justified by reference to Slavs' positive 'racial' value.

German anti-Slavic racism was also the basis for extreme forms of racist dehumanization. For it was not only Bolsheviks, commissars and Jews against whom the concept of the "subhuman" was employed, but also the Soviet people collectively. To be sure, this term was also applied to German criminals and people of supposedly low intelligence as well as 'Negroes' and 'Mongoloids.'
Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, pages 157-160.

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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#14

Post by Totenkomf » 01 Feb 2022, 13:02

So were the Austrias as Germans?
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Re: Were all Europeans considered to be Aryans?

#15

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Feb 2022, 20:04

Totenkomf wrote:
01 Feb 2022, 13:02
So were the Austrias as Germans?
Yes, the Nazis considered the Austrians to be Germans. That was a view held by Nazis and non-Nazis in the early 20th century.

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