Untermensch

Untermensch (German for under man, sub-man, sub-human; plural: Untermenschen) is a term that became infamous when the Nazi racial ideology used it to describe "inferior people", especially "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Gypsies, and Slavic peoples including Poles, Russians, Belarusians and the Ukrainians, although many of the Slavs were accepted as Aryans.

The Nazis maintained that for example the Northern Russians had Nordic traits such as light hair and light eye color and were racially fit to be a part of the master race. The Nazis also considered some percentages of young Slavs like Croatians, Ukrainians, Czechs and Slovaks, with the initial inclusion of Poles and Belarusians to be the sufficient subjects for Germanisation. 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 all of the Slavs from East-Central Europe with the emphasis on the Poles, were destined to be expelled from the European continent by the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the Nazi Germans eventually decided to exterminate the Poles, so as the vast majority of the Slavic people who, along with the Jews and Gypsies, were defined as Untermenschen, dangerous for the Germanic peoples representing the master race.