Nazi racial beliefs

• The Nazis believed that the German state would be stronger if it had a stronger, more racially pure population. This was based on the ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene.
• Eugenics is the mistaken science of selective breeding which was an 1880s development of Darwin’s theories of evolution applied to producing ‘better’ human beings.
• The Nazis developed by encouraging the ‘best’ parents to breed and sterilising those deemed ‘unsuitable’ to prevent them having children.
• The Nazis believed the Aryan race was superior to all others.
• Racial hygiene was taught in schools to encourage Aryan Germans only to reproduce with other ‘Aryans’ to create ‘pure’ offspring. Mixed-race marriages were banned in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
• Hitler was a passionate believer in the hierarchy of races and, in Mein Kampf, set out his belief that Aryans were the master race, other races such as the Slavs of Eastern Europe were sub-human (Untermenschen) with gypsies and Jews at the bottom of the hierarchy and so therefore ‘Lebensunwertes’ (unworthy of life).