Nazism and Race - Propaganda and Implementation of Racial Theories

Propaganda and Implementation of Racial Theories

Nazis developed an elaborate system of propaganda to diffuse these theories. Nazi architecture, for example, was used to create the "new order" and improve the "Aryan race." Sports were also seen by the Nazis as a way to "regenerate the race" by exposing inferior peoples, namely the Jews, as slovenly, sedentary and out-of-shape. The Hitler Youth, founded in 1922, had among its basic motivations the training of future "Aryan supermen" and future soldiers who would faithfully fight for the Third Reich.

Cinema was also used to promote racist theories, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels' Propagandaministerium. The German Hygiene Museum in Dresden diffused racial theories. A 1934 poster of the museum shows a man with distinctly African features and reads, "If this man had been sterilized there would not have been born ... 12 hereditarily diseased."(sic) According to the current director Klaus Voegel, "The Hygiene Museum was not a criminal institute in the sense that people were killed here," but "it helped to shape the idea of which lives were worthy and which were worthless."

Nazi racial theories soon translated into legislation, most notably with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The Action T4 euthanasia programme, in which the Kraft durch Freude (KdF, literally "Strength Through Joy") youth organisation participated, targeted people accused of representing a danger of "degeneration" towards the "Deutsche Volk."

The Nazi régime also implemented a vast bureaucratic apparatus for making "racial determinations," the ancestral proofs of Aryan descent (Ariernachweis) or "German blood" (Deutschblütigkeitserklärung). Probably the vast majority of the population made such a proof during the course of the Third Reich.

During World War II, Germanization efforts were carried out in eastern Europe to cull those of "German blood" there. This started with the classification of people into the Volksliste. Those selected were either sent for Germanization, or killed to prevent "German blood" being used against the Nazis. In regions of Poland, Poles deemed unfit were evicted to make room for Baltic Germans induced to emigrate after the pact with the USSR. Slavs who had Aryan traits and "racially valuable" children were also "abducted from their parents were to be Germanized.

Western countries, such as France, were treated less roughly because they were viewed as racially superior to the Poles, though not as good as full Germans; a complex of racial categories was boiled down by the average German to mean "East is bad and West is acceptable." Still, extensive racial classification was practiced in France, for future uses.