Nazi racial theories

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The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify genocides and racism against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior, invasions of Poland and the USSR, and distant intention for war against Japan. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs (with some exceptions), Romani, Blacks, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some groups such as Sorbs, Czechs, Northern Italians, Greeks, and Iranians to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as Turks, Chinese, and Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as most Slavs, the Romani, and most Indians were considered inferior.

These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of historical race concepts, 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism, White supremacism, German nationalism, and anti-Semitism with the selection of the most extreme parts. They also originated from German military alliance needs. Nazi racist policies and Nazi eastward expansionist steadfastness to make living space and new empire were much inspired by the British Empire and racism in the US, such as Manifest destiny and the Immigration Act of 1924.^[2][3][4][5] The term Aryan generally originated during the discourses about the use of the term Volk (the people constitute a lineage group whose members share a territory, a language, and a culture).^[6]