Racial policy of Nazi Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  The racial policy of Nazi Germany was not one law or one moment. It was a system, built layer by layer, from the first weeks Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 until the end of World War II. At its foundation lay a body of pseudoscientific doctrine asserting the existence of an Aryan master race, a hierarchy of human worth invented to justify discrimination, dispossession, sterilization, and ultimately mass murder. The policy culminated in the Holocaust, the killing of around six million Jews. But it reached far beyond Jews alone. Romani people, Black Germans, Slavs, and dozens of other groups were sorted, ranked, and targeted. The questions worth asking are how this system was built, who helped build it, who was classified as what, and why the bureaucratic machinery ran so smoothly for so long.

• 2. The Aryan Hierarchy

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  Theorists in the Völkisch movement provided the intellectual scaffolding. They believed Germany's Teutonic ancestors had spread across Europe, with Germanic tribes becoming the French, the English, the Belgians, and the Dutch. Writers like Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans F. K. Günther supplied the ideological precursors that Nazi racial theory would absorb and weaponize.

  Nazi doctrine placed human beings on a scale from pure Aryan to Untermensch, a German word meaning subhuman. Germanic peoples sat at the top, joined by Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the English. Italic peoples were rated inferior but tolerated. The French were judged sufficiently Germanic to pass. At the very bottom were Jews, Polish people, Serbs and other Slavs, Romani people, and Black people.

  The Nazis considered Slavs non-Aryans destined for expulsion, enslavement, or extermination under the secret Generalplan Ost, meaning Master Plan East. Their propaganda portrayed Asiatic Slavs as products of intermingling with Mongolians, and claimed they were dominated by Jews and Bolsheviks. This was not a fringe belief. It was state doctrine.

  To encourage the racially preferred to reproduce, the Nazi Party passed the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage in 1933. Newly married Aryan couples received a government loan, with a portion forgiven after each child was born. The aim was to drive up birthrates among those the state deemed racially elite.

• 3. American Blueprints

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  In a 1928 speech about Nazi Party goals, Adolf Hitler openly admired how white men in North America had decimated indigenous people through violence and subterfuge. When the Nazis came to power, they looked to the United States as a practical model of a country that had enacted racist legislation at scale.

  A Nazi legal memo from 1933, authored by a team led by Roland Freisler working under Hanns Kerrl, pointed directly to North American race laws. The memo cited medieval expulsions of Jews from European countries and Jim Crow laws in the American South as models. It summarized the underlying philosophy by writing that the fundamental principle asserting everyone bearing a human face is equal destroys the race and therefore the life force of the Volk. The language was explicit: racial mixing was the problem; the law was the solution.

  Historians sometimes dismissed the connection between Jim Crow and Nazi legislation, but the 1933 memo made the influence plain. The Nazis adapted the mechanisms of Jim Crow into the Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped Jews of German citizenship. The legal architecture of American segregation became a working template for what would follow in Germany.

• 4. Targeting Jews

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  In 1933, approximately 525,000 Jews were living in Germany, representing 0.75% of the population. Persecution began immediately after the seizure of power. The very first challenge was definitional. Lawyer Bernhard Lösener described the internal debate over who counted as Jewish as total chaos. Various percentages of Jewish ancestry were proposed as thresholds. Politician Achim Gercke argued that any Jewish ancestry should be definitive. No consensus existed when the first antisemitic law was passed.

  The Nazis eventually settled on a definition. A person with three or four Jewish grandparents was classified as Jewish. One or two Jewish grandparents meant a person was considered mixed, a category the Nazis called Mischling.

  On the 1st of April 1933, a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses was organized. Six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned Jews from public sector employment. Each subsequent law narrowed the space Jews could occupy in German life. On the 25th of August 1933, the Nazis signed the Haavara Agreement with Zionists, allowing German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for a portion of their assets. Most Jews who left went to Western Europe. By 1939, around 60,000 German Jews had emigrated to Palestine.

  The Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, the Representation of the German Jews, called the Nuremberg Laws the heaviest of blows for Jews in Germany. They appealed for recognition of their communal autonomy and stressed the importance of Jewish education, particularly in preparation for emigration, with emphasis on manual labor, Hebrew studies, and vocational training for girls.

• 5. The Nuremberg Laws

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  On the 15th of September 1935, at a special session of the Reichstag held during the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally, two sweeping pieces of legislation were introduced. The first was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. It prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. It also barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45. Such relationships were classified as Rassenschande, meaning racial pollution. The prohibition was later extended to Romani people and Black people.

  The second law was the Reich Citizenship Law, which restricted full citizenship to people of German or related blood. Everyone else was reduced to the status of state subject, stripped of fundamental legal protections. The Reichsvertretung called these laws the heaviest blow for Jews in Germany and requested recognition of communal autonomy, continued Jewish education, and preparation for emigration.

  The laws provided the legal infrastructure for exclusion. They transformed discrimination from a series of administrative actions into a codified constitutional order. Everything that followed built on this foundation.

• 6. The Holocaust

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  From 1933 through 1940, the Nazis' official public policy was the expulsion of Jews from Germany. Beginning in 1940, that policy shifted, and it shifted in secret. The Nazis began moving toward annihilation. Internally they called this the Final Solution. They revealed it to non-Nazi German government officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Around six million Jews from Nazi-occupied territory were killed.

  The sterilization program had already revealed how the machinery could be scaled. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, passed in July 1933, authorized compulsory sterilization ordered by a Hereditary Health Court for anyone diagnosed with conditions including intellectual disability, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, blindness, deafness, any severe hereditary deformity, and even alcoholism. Between 1933 and 1945, between 300,000 and 400,000 people were sterilized under this law. The policy then accelerated from sterilization into euthanasia through programs like Aktion T4.

• 7. Other Targeted Groups

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  The Nazis considered roughly 10% of Romani people to be Aryan. Persecution of the Romani began in 1936 with internment. Eventually 23,000 Romani people were sent to concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler proposed a dedicated Gypsy Law to separate Romani people from the German population and prevent intermingling of blood, but despite extensive discussion, no specific Gypsy Law was ever formally enacted.

  The Black population of Germany in 1933 numbered perhaps as many as 25,000 people. There was no systematic annihilation plan aimed at Black Germans, but many were imprisoned, sterilized, and killed. Black entertainers had found audiences in Germany, but the Nazis banned jazz, labeling it Negermusik. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had written that France was becoming more negrified and that African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland represented a contamination of the Aryan race. The Nazis referred to biracial children of Senegalese soldiers as Rhineland Bastards and sterilized 400 of these children in 1938. Paradoxically, African-Germans had a better statistical chance of surviving the war than the average German, because they were typically excluded from military service.

  Sorbs living in Saxony and Brandenburg, a Slavic community within Germany's own borders, also faced suppression of their language and culture. Tens of thousands were imprisoned. They became lesser-known victims of the same racial laws that targeted groups far more visible in the historical record.

  For Polish people, the rules were laid out with bureaucratic precision. A decree issued on the 8th of March 1940 regulated the working and living conditions of Polish laborers in Germany. All Poles were required to wear a purple badge marked with the letter P. Any Pole found to have sexual or improper relations with a German could be executed. The Gestapo pursued every such case. Hundreds of Polish and Russian men were executed for relationships with German women. The Nazis also kidnapped Polish children who displayed what they classified as Nordic racial characteristics. Those deemed racially valuable were to be raised as Germans. Those who failed the tests were designated for slave labor or death in medical experiments.

• 8. Contradictions and Exceptions

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  Nazi racial ideology was not a coherent system. It was shot through with political contradictions, diplomatic exemptions, and internal disagreements that exposed its pseudoscientific core.

  Iranians received a formal exemption in 1936, when the Reich Cabinet excluded them from restrictions under the Nuremberg Laws. In 1939, Germany provided Iran with a library of over 7,500 books to demonstrate cultural kinship. Nazi policy toward Turkey was described by the source as muddled. On the 30th of April 1936, the Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy pronounced Turks to be Europeans, but Jewish Turks and Turks of colored origin were excluded from that classification. A misconception spread that Turks had been given full Aryan status, which was never precisely what happened.

  The Crimean Karaites, Turkic speakers who followed Karaite Judaism, obtained a declaration from the Reich Agency for the Investigation of Families stating they should not be considered Jewish and their racial classification should be done individually. A few Karaites were nonetheless killed by German troops in Russia who were unaware the declaration existed.

  The treatment of Han Chinese and Japanese people illustrated the deepest contradictions. Despite originating from entirely different evolutionary backgrounds, both groups were designated by Hitler and the Nazi government as Aryans of the East and the Herrenvolk of the Orient. In 1945, Hitler stated in his Bormann dictations on the 13th of February that he had never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior, and that their ancient civilizations had a past superior to Germany's own.

  This special status had practical effects. Han Chinese and Japanese soldiers were allowed to study in Nazi German military academies and serve in the Wehrmacht. Germany had supported the Republic of China militarily since 1926. Advisers including Alexander von Falkenhausen and Hans von Seeckt were sent to assist the Chinese. Max Bauer served as an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. On the 13th of June 1937, Hsiang-hsi Kung, the Republic of China Minister of Finance, was warmly welcomed by Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Hjalmar Schacht, who bestowed an honorary doctorate on him and attempted to open China's market to German exports. Hitler, Göring, and Schacht also earmarked 100,000 reichsmarks for Han Chinese students studying in German universities and military academies.

  The most prominent example was Chiang Wei-kuo, son of Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek. He studied military strategy at a Kriegsschule in Munich, achieved the rank of lieutenant, and served in the Wehrmacht on active combat duty in Europe before returning to China during the later years of World War II.

  Despite all of this, the exemptions were contested. The Racial Policy Office opposed changing the laws to formally exclude Japanese and Chinese people. German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath issued an exemption for Han Chinese and Japanese in October 1933. Another decree in April 1935 stated that racial discrimination cases involving Aryans of the East that might threaten German diplomatic relations would be handled individually. In 1934, the German government prohibited the German press from discussing the racial laws when Japanese or Han Chinese were involved, precisely to avoid diplomatic problems. The exemption system itself revealed that the racial hierarchy was always as much a political tool as an ideological conviction.