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The master race ( ) is a Pseudoscience concept in Nazism, in which the putative Aryan race is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as master humans (Herrenmenschen ).
The Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg believed that the "Nordic race" was descended from Proto-Indo-Europeans, who he thought had Prehistory dwelt on the North German Plain and may have ultimately originated on the Lost lands of Atlantis.Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century. The term Atlantis is mentioned two times in the whole book; the term Atlantis-hypothesis is mentioned just once. Rosenberg (p. 24): "It seems to be not completely impossible, that at parts where today the waves of the Atlantic ocean murmur and icebergs move along, once a blossoming land towered in the water, on which a creative race founded a great culture and sent its children as seafarers and warriors into the world; but if this Atlantis-hypothesis proves untenable, we still have to presume a prehistoric Nordic cultural center." Rosenberg (p. 26): "The ridiculed hypothesis about a Nordic creative center, which we can call Atlantis – without meaning a sunken island – from where once waves of warriors migrated to all directions as first witnesses of Nordic longing for distant lands to conquer and create, today becomes probable." Original: " Es erscheint als nicht ganz ausgeschlossen, dass an Stellen, über die heute die Wellen des Atlantischen Ozeans rauschen und riesige Eisgebirge herziehen, einst ein blühendes Festland aus den Fluten ragte, auf dem eine schöpferische Rasse große, weitausgreifende Kultur erzeugte und ihre Kinder als Seefahrer und Krieger hinaussandte in die Welt; aber selbst wenn sich diese Atlantishypothese als nicht haltbar erweisen sollte, wird ein nordisches vorgeschichtliches Kulturzentrum angenommen werden müssen. ... Und deshalb wird die alte verlachte Hypothese heute Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass von einem nordischen Mittelpunkt der Schöpfung, nennen wir ihn, ohne uns auf die Annahme eines versunkenen atlantischen Erdteils festzulegen, die Atlantis, einst Kriegerschwärme strahlenförmig ausgewandert sind als erste Zeugen des immer wieder sich erneut verkörpernden nordischen Fernwehs, um zu erobern, zu gestalten." The Nazis declared that the Aryan race were superior to all other races, and believed they were entitled to expand territorially.Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf 1925 The actual policy that was implemented by the Nazis resulted in the Aryan certificate. This document, which was required by law for all citizens of the Reich, was the "Lesser Aryan certificate" ( Kleiner Ariernachweis) and could be obtained through an Ahnenpass, which required the owner to trace their lineage through baptism, birth certificates, or certified proof thereof that all grandparents were of "Aryan descent".
The Slavs, Romani people, and Jews were defined as being racially inferior and non-Aryan " Untermenschen", and were thus considered a danger to the Aryan or Germanic peoples master race. According to the Nazi secret Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population was to be removed from Central Europe through expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination, except for a small percentage who were deemed to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers, and thus suitable for Germanisation.
In 1855, French count Arthur de Gobineau published his infamous work An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the Third Estate's claims, Gobineau divides the human species into three major groups: white, yellow and black, claiming that "history springs only from contact with the white races". He considers the Aryan race to be the pinnacle of human development, serving as the basis of all European aristocracies. However, inevitable miscegenation led to the "downfall of civilizations".
Gobineau's influence was minimal at first. In his letters to Alexis de Tocqueville, he complained that his book was getting little attention in France and was only having an impact in the United States. Despite his friendship with Gobineau Tocqueville rejected the book, explaining that it was in accordance with the interests of slave owners in the Southern states. However, in the 1880s, the book gained popularity in Germany thanks to Cosima Wagner's efforts. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Germanophile Englishman and Cosima Wagner's son-in-law, published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Expanding on Gobineau's earlier theories, he argued that the Teutons peoples had a profound influence on Western culture. Chamberlain classified all European peoples, including Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins, as the "Aryan race", which was built on ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. He saw the Nordic race or Teutonic peoples as the leaders of the Aryan race, and essentially all races.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the concept of Übermensch, which translates to "Overman" or "Superman". In his 1883 book ( Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None), he proposed the idea of the Übermensch as a goal for humanity. However, Nietzsche never developed the concept based on race. Instead, the Übermensch "seems to be the ideal aim of spiritual development more than a biological goal".Robert C. Solomon (2025). 9780805241570, Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc.. . ISBN 9780805241570 Nazism distorted the concept's real meaning to suit its "master race" ideology.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was believed that Indo-Europeans (generally referred to as ) were the highest branch of humanity due to their technological advancement. This reasoning was simultaneously linked with Nordicism, which claimed that the "Nordic race" was the "purest" form of the Aryan race. Today, this view is regarded as a form of scientific racism. It contradicts the belief in racial equality by advocating the view that one race is superior to all other races.
In 1908, the Louisiana State Fair hosted the first "Better Babies" competition. Babies were judged based on livestock standards such as height, weight, unblemished skin, well-formed fingers, lack of excess fat, and cooperative behavior. The intent was to establish child-breeding health standards. Beginning in 1920, at the Kansas State Fair, a "Fitter Family" contest, sponsored by the American Eugenics Society's Committee on Popular Education, required family members to submit an "Abridged Records of Family Traits" and then undergo physical and psychological examinations to determine their "fitness", or eugenic health. Contests received letter grades, and the winners—almost always white and of Western and Northern European descent—were awarded trophies. Some years later, beginning in 1935, contestants in the Miss America contest were required to be "of the white race" and to submit a detailed account of their ancestry; those with backgrounds connected to the Pilgrims' arrival on the Mayflower or the American Revolutionary War had an advantage.Speier, Susanna (June 29, 2011) "Beauty Pageants and the Misunderstanding of Evolution Meet....Again" Scientific American
The Nazis took this concept to an extreme by establishing a Lebensborn the Nordic Aryans themselves through a program of Nazi eugenics, based on the eugenics laws of the US state of California, to create a super race.
In their attempt to scientifically prove the racial inferiority of Slavs, German (and Austrian) racial scientists were forced to gloss over their findings which consistently proved that Early Slavs were Cephalic index and fair haired, i.e., "Nordic", while the South Slavic "Dinaric" sub-race was often viewed favourable. Nazis used the term "Slavic race", and considered Slavs to be non-Aryan. The concept of a Slavic "Untermensch" accompanied their political goals, and it was particularly aimed at Polish people and Russians. Germany's immediate goal was Drang nach Osten or expansion into the East, which was the first phase in its ultimate plan to conquer Europe, and Ukraine's "chernozem" (black earth) soil was regarded as a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the " Herrenvolk" () ("master people").
In relation to the Nazis' belief in Racial hygiene, author and historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote:
There has been in Virginia as earnest a desire to abolish slavery as exists any where at this day. It commenced with the Revolution, and many of our ablest and most influential men were active in recommending it, and in devising plans for the accomplishment of it. The Legislature encouraged and facilitated emancipation by the owners, and many slaves were so emancipated. The leaning of the courts of justice was always in favorem libertatis. This disposition continued until the impracticability of effecting a general emancipation, without incalculable mischief to the master race, and danger of utter destruction to the other, and the evils consequent on partial emancipations, became too obvious to the Legislature, and to the great majority of the people, to be longer disregarded. Gales & Seaton's Register, 1836, p. 191
The Oxford English Dictionary records that William J. Grayson used the phrase "master race" in his poem The Hireling and the Slave (1855):
For these great ends hath Heaven’s supreme command Brought the black savage from his native land, Trains for each purpose his barbarian mind, By slavery tamed, enlightened, and refined; Instructs him, from a master-race, to draw Wise modes of polity and forms of law, Imbues his soul with faith, his heart with love, Shapes all his life by dictates from above
where the phrase denotes the relation between the white masters and negro slaves.
By 1860 Virginian author George Fitzhugh was using the "challenging phrase 'master race', which soon came to mean considerably more than the ordinary master-slave relationship".Wish, Harvey George Fitzhugh: propagandist of the Old South Louisiana State University Press (1943) p. 270 Fitzhugh, along with a number of southern writers, used the term to differentiate Southerners from Northerners, based on the dichotomy that Southerners were supposedly descendants of Normans / Cavaliers whereas Northerners were descendants of Anglo-Saxons / Puritans.see Watson jr, Ritchie Devon Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War Louisiana State University Press (2008)
In the works of John H. Van Evrie, a Northern supporter of the Confederacy, the term was interchangeable with white supremacy, notably in White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race and (so-called) slavery its normal condition (1861). In Subgeneation: the theory of the normal relations of the races; an answer to miscegenation (1864) Van Evrie created the words "subgen" to describe what he considered to be the "inferior races" and "subgeneation" to describe the ‘normal’ relation of such inferior races to whites, something which he considered to be the "very corner-stone of democracy"; Subgeneation p.42 but these words never entered the dictionary.
The racial term Untermensch originates from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "coloured" peoples to white civilization, with his most famous book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Alfred Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard. As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Referring to Russian communists, Rosenbeg wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" "...den
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the earliest proponents of a theory presenting a hierarchical racial model of history, attributing civilisational primacy to the "white races" who gained their sensitivity and intelligence by refinement in the rigorous north.
The highest civilisation and culture, apart from the Ancient Indians and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is because necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilisation.Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, Section 92
Despite this, he was adamantly against differing treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery, supporting the abolitionist movement in the United States. He describes the treatment of "our innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into the devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record". Parerga and Paralipomena, "On Ethics," Sec. 5
Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, stated that Hitler carried a copy of Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Representation with him wherever he went throughout World War I.
The postulated Supremacism of these people was said to make them born leaders, or a "master race". Other authors included Guido von List, his associate Lanz von Liebenfels, and the British-born German racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, all of whom felt that the white race in general, and Germanic peoples in particular, were superior to others, given the Racial purity of both the white race and the German people from the other races which were "polluting" them, a new Millenarianism age of Aryan god-men would arrive.
Nazi policy stressed the superiority of the Germanic " Übermenschen" ("superhuman") Nordic race, a sub-race of the European population defined by anthropometric models of racial difference. The Nordic race was said to comprise only of the : Scandinavians and the rest of the Nordic countries (Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Faroese), ethnic Germans (including Austrians, Banat Swabians, as well as Sudeten Germans, Baltic Germans and Volga Germans), Alemannic Swiss, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers, the Dutch, Flemings, Afrikaners, Frisians and the English.
The Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen. The fact that Germans were not purely Nordic was acknowledged by Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Racial Science of the German People") from 1922, in which he described the German people as being made up of all five of his European racial categories: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric race, Alpine race, and East Baltic.Anne Maxwell. Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940. Eastbourne, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2008, 2010. p. 150. Most official Nazi comments on the Nordic race were based on Günther's works, and Alfred Rosenberg presented Günther with a medal for his work in anthropology.
Although the physical ideal of these racial theorists was typically the tall, blond, and Eye colour Nordic individual, such theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair and eye colour existed within the racial categories they recognised. For example, Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials had dark hair and were still considered members of the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine, because the determination of an individual's racial type depended on a preponderance of many characteristics in an individual rather than on just one defining feature."The range of blond hair colour in pure Nordic peoples runs from flaxen and red to shades of chestnut and brown ... It must be clearly understood that blondness of hair and of eye is not a final test of Nordic race. The Nordics include all the blonds, and also those of darker hair or eye when possessed of a preponderance of other Nordic characters. In this sense the word "blond" means those lighter shades of hair or eye colour in contrast to the very dark or black shades which are termed brunet. The meaning of 'blond' as now used is therefore not limited to the lighter or flaxen shades as in colloquial speech. In England among Nordic populations there are large numbers of individuals with hazel brown eyes joined with the light brown or chestnut hair which is the typical hair shade of the English and Americans. This combination is also common in Holland and Westphalia and is frequently associated with a very fair skin. These men are all of 'blond' aspect and constitution and consequently are to be classed as members of the Nordic race." Quoted in Grant, 1922, p. 26.
Hitler and Heinrich Himmler planned to use the SS as the basis for the racial "regeneration" of Europe following the final victory of Nazism. The SS was to be a racial elite chosen on the basis of "pure" Nordic qualities.Geoffrey G. Field, "Nordic Racism", Journal of the History of Ideas, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977, p. 523
Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of ancient Mediterranean peoples. His concept of the Mediterranean race became important to the modelling of racial difference in the early twentieth century.
Following the ideas of Gobineau and others, the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg determined that these people, who, he claimed, were originally from Atlantis, were a dynamic warrior people who dwelt in northern climates on the North German Plain in Prehistory, from which they migrated southeast by riding their chariots, eventually reaching Ukraine, Iran, and then India. They were supposed to be the ancestors of the ancient Germanic tribes, who shared their warrior values. Rosenberg opposed Christianity because to him, it was an alien Semitic people slave-morality which was inappropriate for the warrior Aryan master race and in its place, he supported a melange of aspects of Hindu Vedic and Zoroastrianism teachings (both of these religions were organised by Aryans), along with pre-Christian European Odinism, which he also considered distinctively Aryan in character.Alfred Rosenberg Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1930 ("The Myth of the 20th Century")
In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 forbade sexual relations and marriage between an "Aryan" and a "non-Aryan" in order to maintain the purity of the Aryan race. Such relations became a punishable crime which was known as Rassenschande or "racial shame". The League of German Girls was particularly required to instruct girls to avoid Rassenschande because according to Nazism, maintaining racial purity was particularly important for young females. Aryans found guilty of this crime could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could even face the death penalty.Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p. 125, The Nazis recognized the Germanic people as the master race, and several policies were implemented in order to improve and maintain the Germanic-Nordic ubermenschen Aryan "master race," including the practice of eugenics. In order to eliminate "defective" citizens and rid the country of the intellectually disabled or those who were born with genetic deficiencies, as well as those who were deemed racially inferior, the T-4 Euthanasia Program was administered by Karl Brandt, one of Hitler's personal physicians. Additionally, a program of compulsory sterilisation was also implemented and as a result of it, forced operations were performed on hundreds of thousands of individuals. Many of these policies are generally seen as being related to what eventually became known as the Holocaust.
The Nazis also undertook measures to increase the number of Nordics in Germany. The Lebensborn program was only open to German women who fit the Nordic profile. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Nazis took young Nordic-looking Polish children who were classified as being descended from ethnic German settlers in order to determine whether or not they were "racially valuable". If that were the case, the young children were taken back to these Lebensborn houses so they could be raised as Germans.
In Nazi Germany, the Aryan certificate was an official document which certified that its owner was an Aryan. Aryan certificates could also be obtained by citizens of other countries. In its section which is titled Racial Tenet ( Rassegrundsatz), the Aryan certificate states:
For the "Greater Aryan certificate" Germans had to prove that as far back as January 1, 1800 "none of their paternal nor their maternal ancestors had Jewish or coloured blood".Quotation in German: " wer unter seinen Vorfahren väterlicherseits oder mütterlicherseits kein jüdisches oder farbiges Blut hat"; in: Isabel Heinemann. "Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut", Wallstein Verlag, 1999, , p. 54 Schutzstaffel officers had to prove this reaching back to 1750.
During a speech he made in 1936, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said:
In 1943, Reichskommissar for Ukraine Erich Koch reminded Germans:
Charles Gabriel Seligman also stated that "it must, I think, be recognised that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievements to its credit than any other race, since it is responsible for by far the greater part of Mediterranean civilisation, certainly before 1000 BC (and probably much later), and so shaped not only the Aegean cultures, but those of Western as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean lands, while the culture of their near relatives, the Hamites pre-dynastic Egyptians, formed the basis of that of Egypt." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 54. (January – June, 1924), p. 30.
The Nazis explained this by claiming that the original Latins and Greeks were Indo-European Nordic tribes which had migrated into Italy and Greece, during the Iron Age era. The Nazis also claimed that the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empires were examples of Nordic power since, at the time, their governments were run by the descendants of the Germanic Visigoths who invaded Spain and Portugal fifteen centuries earlier. However, they did admit that the masses of people who lived during the flowering of these four civilizations were Mediterranean. This led to Germans of all European races to be classified as Aryans.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the original Buck Rogers stories and Comic strip, Buck Rogers, in his adventures in the 25th century that takes place on Earth, depicts him fighting for Aryan-Americans from the liberated zone around Niagara, New York, against the Red Mongol Empire, a Chinese empire of the future which rules most of North America. The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 1969 Chelsea HouseIntroduction by of the original Buck Rogers comic strips
In the 1930s, both educational and storybooks for children in Germany taught their readers about the master race. In the Sun Koh science fiction series, the protagonist Koh says things like "My forefathers were Aryan", and in a story about Atlantis, he says, "If our Atlantis once again rises out of the sea, then we will get from there the blond, steel-hard men with the pure blood and will create with them the master race, which will finally rule the earth."Julia Voss, "Jim Knopf rettet die Evolutionstheorie" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (December 16, 2008). Retrieved July 31, 2011 The German writer Michael Ende, who was born in 1929 and grew up reading such books, wrote his classic novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver in the 1950s, as a way of opposing the Nazi propaganda he was taught as a child. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writer Julia Voss wrote a bookVoss' book was written as a doctoral dissertation. on Jim Button, uncovering Ende's many references to Nazi symbols in that book. Book review of Darwins Jim Knopf by Julia Voss Kultiversum.de "Im Zickzack durch Lummerland" (2009). Retrieved August 4, 2011 Voss shows how Ende upends the Nazi belief that Atlantis was the original home of the Aryan race by creating his own submerged city and making it rise, but not to restore Aryan master-race rule over the Earth, rather it becomes a multi-racial paradise with Jim Button, who is black and a descendant of the Magi Caspar, as its king.
In the 1948 film Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the central characters, Brandon Shaw, is a firm believer in the master race ideology.
In the Doctor Who series, the Doctor's frequent enemies, the Daleks, consider themselves a master race which must purge the universe of all other life forms; Terry Nation explicitly modeled them on the Nazis.http://nzdwfc.tetrap.com/archive/tsv51/terrynation.html | Terry Nation – Writing For The Screen, By Paul Scoones In the 2009 special "The End of Time", when the Master transforms the entire human race into copies of himself, he claims that there is no human race, but only "the Master race".
In the Harry Potter series, while the parallels were not originally intentional, there is much similarity between Lord Voldemort's "pureblood" ideology and the master race ideology of the Nazis, with wizards being "pure" and anyone with Muggle (non-wizard) blood being considered "half-blood" or "mudblood", a word used and treated the same way a racial slur would be in the real world (Neo-Nazism call non-white people mud people).
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