Master Race

Master race (Herrenvolk (German: die Herrenrasse, das Herrenvolk)) was a concept in Nazi ideology in which the Nordic race, a branch of what in late-19th and early-20th century taxonomy was called the Aryan race, represented an ideal and "pure race". In Nazi ideology this "Nordic" race was the purest example of the original racial stock of those who were then called the Proto-Aryans, whom the Nazis believed to have prehistorically dwelt on the North German Plain and to have ultimately originated from the lost continent of Atlantis. The Nazis declared that the Nordics, (nowadays referred to as the Germanic peoples), were the true Aryans because they were less racially mixed with "non-native" Indo-European peoples than other people of what were then called the Aryan peoples (now generally called the Indo-European peoples), such as the Slavic peoples, the Romance peoples and the Indo-Iranian peoples. Based on this claim that the "Nordic" peoples were superior to all other races, the Nazis believed they were entitled to world domination. This concept is known as Nordicism.

The Nazis maintained that many of the Slavs that had Nordic traits such as light hair and light eye color were thus seen to be racially fit to be a part of the master race. The Nazis in accordance to this considered some Russians, some Poles, some Czechs and some Belarusians to be sufficient subjects for Germanisation in order to be considered Aryan. However, it was believed that for instance the Polish people were too patriotic and would ultimately resist Germanisation, what resulted in the Generalplan Ost, according to which most of the Slavs from East-Central Europe were destined to be expelled from the European continent by the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the Nazis eventually decided to exterminate (largely by starvation) the Poles and most of the other Slavic people (those of non-Nordic features and refused to be Aryanized) who, along with the Jews and Gypsies, were defined as untermenschen, dangerous for the Germanic peoples representing the master race.