[edit] The "Untermensch" in Nazi propaganda and policy
Nazis believed that
Jews,
Slavic people,
Gypsies or
Africans, and
asocial element, as well as people with a mental or physical
disability,
homosexuals,
criminals,
prostitutes,
beggars,
tramps, political
dissidents, and so-called
morally degenerates were subhuman.
The term "Untermensch" was utilized repeatedly in writings and speeches directed against the Jews, the most notorious example being a 1935 SS publication with the title "Der Untermensch" which contains an
antisemitic tirade sometimes considered to be an extract from a speech held by
Heinrich Himmler. In the pamphlet
The SS as an Anti-bolshevist Fighting Organization, Himmler wrote in
1936:
We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.[1]
Another example for using the term "Untermensch," this time in connection with anti-Soviet propaganda, is another brochure, again titled "Der Untermensch" and edited by Himmler. Published in 1942 after the start of
Operation Barbarossa, it is around fifty pages long and consists for the most part of photos casting an extremely negative light on the enemy (see link below for the title page). Historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes that for the Nazis, "it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch, which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of
Judeo-Bolshevism."
[4]
The Race and Settlement Head Office in 1942 distributed a pamphlet "The Sub-Human" to those responsible for that selection of which 3,860,995 copies were printed in German language. It was also translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Czech and seven other languages. The pamphlet states the following:
The sub-human, that biologically seemingly complete similar creation of nature with hands, feet and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is nevertheless a completely different, dreadful creature. He is only a rough copy of a human being, with human-like facial traits but nonetheless morally and mentally lower than any animal. Within this creature there is a fearful chaos of wild, uninhibited passions, nameless destructiveness, the most primitive desires, the nakedest vulgarity. Sub-human, otherwise nothing. For all that bear a human face are not equal. Woe to him who forgets it.
This concept by RuSHA included Jews, Gypsies, and some of the Slavic peoples.
[2] The Nazis acknowledged that some of sub-humans have had ancestors of Aryan-Nordic descent-such people were to be exterminated to eliminate the leadership class among "inferior races", and children if suitable racially were to be kidnapped for Germanisation.
The concept of the Slavic people being "Untermensch" in particular served the Nazis as justification for their
genocidal policies and especially their aggression against
Poland and the
Soviet Union in order to conquer
Lebensraum. Early plans of the German Reich (summarized as
Generalplan Ost) envisaged the displacement, enslavement, and elimination of no less than 50 million people who were not considered fit for
Germanization from territories it wanted to conquer in Eastern Europe.
[3] See also
Genocides in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
nice use of language there carthage
