Nazi ideology is often given a major or overriding importance in explaining the murder of the European Jews. Many scholars see racism and anti-Jewish attitudes at the core of this ideology. Some historians argue that anti-Jewish ideas were necessary or a precondition for extermination but not sufficient to explain it. Some have portrayed hatred of Jews as being at the center of Nazi ideology, in contrast to those who put anti-Judaism in a broader context of racism and social utopias. In fact, “anti-Semitism,” though important, does not explain “eugenics, pro-natalism, killing the disabled, militarism, expansionism, or Nazi racial policies aimed at Gypsies, blacks, Slavs, or the ‘asocial.’ ” This chapter takes a closer look at the sometimes surprising inner workings of Nazi and German racist thought in order to locate anti-Jewish sentiments therein and explain differences between racial theory and political practice.

Racism as a form of ascribing a common ancestry to groups, assuming qualitative differences, and justifying social hierarchies among them on that basis, has been known in many cultures and for thousands of years. European ‘scientific’ racism evolved in the seventeenth century – first as a legitimation of European superiority over non-European peoples, supplemented in the nineteenth century by the idea that large human collectives within Europe differed biologically. In the second half of the 1800s, some degree of racist thought became common among European thinkers. This way of thinking influenced the spread of nationalism in Europe (and beyond), generating something that has been called “ethnopolitics,” and certain aspects of such racism have been portrayed as “rebellion against modernity.” Racial thinking seemed to provide orientation during a time of social upheaval that was being brought about by industrial capitalism and moral crisis.

According to Nazi-German racists, race membership determined everyday and political life. They explained history as a sequence of struggles among races, for example, over land for sustenance. Increasingly, races were assumed to be of different values, as were the people who belonged to them. Racists ascribed certain mentalities, character traits, patterns of behavior and cultural achievements to each race, usually putting their own race first. In Germany, people of the ‘Nordic’ race were supposed to be of the highest quality. One German didactical book hierarchically ordered the races as follows: white people over people of color; among whites, Aryans over Jews; and among Aryans, the “Nordic” races over the eastern ones.