Untermensch


Untermensch is a Nazi term for non-Aryan "inferior people" often referred to as "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs. The term was also applied to Blacks and Mulattos. Jewish people were to be exterminated in the Holocaust, along with the Polish and Romani people, and the physically and mentally disabled. According to the Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population of East-Central Europe was to be reduced in part through mass murder in the Holocaust, with a majority expelled to Asia and used as slave labor in the Reich. These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy.

Etymology

Although usually incorrectly considered to have been coined by the Nazis, the term "under man" was first used by American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. Stoddard uses the term for those he considers unable to function in civilisation, which he generally attributes to race. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen.
The German word Untermensch had been used earlier, but not in a racial sense, for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, Untermensch is usually translated into English as "sub-human". The leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives".
It is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an opposite to Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch concept. Stoddard does not say so explicitly, but he refers critically to the "superman" idea at the end of his book. Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and roots almost at will in order to create new words, this development can be considered logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der Stechlin. Nietzsche used Untermensch at least once in contrast to Übermensch in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft ; however, he did so in reference to semi-human creatures in mythology, naming them alongside dwarfs, fairies, centaurs and so on. Earlier examples of Untermensch include Romanticist Jean Paul using the term in his novel Hesperus in reference to an Orangutan.

Nazi propaganda and policy

In a speech in 1927 to the Bavarian regional parliament, the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, used the term Untermensch referring to the communists of the German Bavarian Soviet Republic:
Nazis repeatedly used the term Untermensch in writings and speeches directed against the Jews, the most notorious example being a 1942 SS publication with the title Der Untermensch, which contains an antisemitic tirade sometimes considered to be an extract from a speech by Heinrich Himmler. In the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization", published in 1936, Himmler wrote:
In his speech "Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus" in 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that "subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent". At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels also declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."
Another example of the use of the term Untermensch, this time in connection with anti-Soviet propaganda, is a brochure entitled "Der Untermensch", edited by Himmler and distributed by the Race and Settlement Head Office. SS-Obersturmführer Ludwig Pröscholdt, Jupp Daehler and SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt Koenig are associated with its production. Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it is around 50 pages long and consists for the most part of photos portraying the enemy in an extremely negative way. 3,860,995 copies were printed in the German language. It was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and seven other languages. The pamphlet says the following:

Sub-human types

Nazis classified those they called the sub-humans into different types; they placed priority on extermination of the Jews, and exploitation of others as slaves.
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."
The Untermensch concept included Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Slavic peoples such as Poles, Serbs and Russians. The Slavs were regarded as Untermenschen, barely fit for exploitation as slaves. Hitler and Goebbels compared them to the "rabbit family" or to "stolid animals" that were "idle" and "disorganized" and spread like a "wave of filth". However, some among the Slavs who happened to have Nordic racial features were deemed to have distant Germanic descent which meant partially "Aryan" origin, and if under 10 years old, they were to be Germanized.
The Nazi views on the Slavs were explicitly contemptuous, as even prior to the World War II, Slavs, particularly the Poles, were deemed as being inferior to Germans. After Adolf Hitler gained political power in Germany, the concept of Non-Aryan "sub-human slave-material" was developed and started to be used also towards other Slavic peoples. Poles and Serbs were at the bottom of the Slavic "racial hierarchy" established by the Nazis. Soon after Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact expired, also Russians started to be seen as part of the "subhuman" race. Similarly, also Belarusians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ukrainians were considered to be inferior, despite some collaborative groups were found among these nations. Nonetheless, there were Slavs such as Bosniaks, Bulgarians, and Croats who collaborated with Nazi Germany that were still being perceived as not racially "pure" enough to reach the status of Germanic peoples, yet they were eventually considered ethnically better than all other Slavs, mostly due to pseudoscientific theories about these nations having a minimal amount of Slavic genes and considerable admixtures of Germanic and Turkic blood.
In order to forge a strategic alliance with the Independent State of Croatia - a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia - and the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Nazis deviated from a strict interpretation of their racial ideology, and Croats were officially described as "more Germanic than Slav", a notion supported by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained that the "Croatians were descendants of the ancient Goths" and "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". Hitler also deemed the Bulgarians to be "Turkoman" in origin.
is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read 'Neues Volk| New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."
While the Nazis were inconsistent in the implementation of their policy - for instance, mostly implementing the Final Solution while also implementing Generalplan Ost - the democidal death toll was in tens of millions of victims. It is related to the concept of "life unworthy of life", a more specific term which originally referred to the severely disabled who were involuntarily euthanised in Action T4, and was eventually applied to the extermination of the Jews. That policy of euthanasia started officially on Sept 1st 1939 when Hitler signed an edict to the effect, and the poison gas carbon monoxide was used first to murder disabled patients. The same gas was effectively used in the death camps to murder Jews and other groups. The death camps included Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka, although the nazis used cheaper engine exhaust gases to achieve the same end.
In the directive No. 1306 by from 24 October 1939, the term "Untermensch" is used in reference to Polish ethnicity and culture, as follows:
Biology classes in Nazi Germany schools taught about differences between the race of Nordic German "Übermenschen" and "ignoble" Jewish and Slavic "subhumans". The view that Slavs were subhuman was widespread among the German masses, and chiefly applied to the Poles. It continued to find support after the war.
During the war, Nazi propaganda instructed Wehrmacht officers to tell their soldiers to target people described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans" and that the war in the Soviet Union was between the Germans and the Jewish, Gypsies and Slavic Untermenschen.
During the Warsaw Uprising, Himmler ordered the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto because according to him it allowed the "living space" of 500,000 subhumans.
As a pragmatic way to solve military manpower shortages, the Nazis used soldiers from some Slavic countries, firstly from the Reich's allies Croatia and Bulgaria and also within occupied territories. The concept of the Slavs in particular being Untermenschen served the Nazis' political goals; it was used to justify their expansionist policy and especially their aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union in order to achieve Lebensraum, particularly in Ukraine. Early plans of the German Reich envisioned the displacement, enslavement, and elimination of no fewer than 50 million people, who were not considered fit for Germanization, from territories it wanted to conquer in Europe; Ukraine's chernozem soil was considered a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the Herrenvolk.