Nazi racial ideology and the treatment of minorities

Key learning points

1. Nazi racial beliefs were shaped by earlier scientific ideas, but they distorted them for ideological goals.
2. Nazi racial ideology divided people into a hierarchy, with Aryans at the top and others labelled as sub-humans.
3. The Nazis used eugenics to justify sterilisation and the euthanasia of people with disabilities.
4. Nazi policies targeted Slavs, Roma, Sinti, Afro-Germans and homosexuals as threats to racial purity.
5. Concentration camps were used to isolate and imprison particular groups of people.

Keywords

• Eugenics - the belief that human populations could be 'improved' through selective breeding by encouraging reproduction among those deemed 'fit' and preventing it among the 'unfit'

• Aryan - an ancient group of Indo-European peoples; the Nazis wrongly redefined ‘Aryan’ to mean a racially pure, northern European person who were biologically superior and destined to rule over other races

• Sterilisation - the process of having a medical operation to make it impossible to have children

• Hereditarily - relating to traits or conditions passed from parents to children through genes, such as eye colour or certain genetic diseases

• Euthanasia - the act of killing someone who is very ill or very old so that they do not suffer any more; the Nazis used this term to justify murdering those they deemed 'unworthy of life'

Common misconception