# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Racism: An Overview

Racists are people who believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. The doctrine of racism asserts that blood is the marker of national-ethnic identity. Within a racist framework, the value of a human being is not determined by his or her individuality, but instead by membership in a so-called "racial collective nation." Many intellectuals, including scientists, have lent pseudoscientific support to racist thinking. Nineteenth century racist thinkers, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, exerted a significant influence on many in Adolf Hitler's generation.

Racism, including racial antisemitism (prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false biological theories), was always an integral part of German National Socialism (Nazism). The Nazis perceived all of human history as the history of a biologically determined struggle among people of different races. The Nazis postulated that political movements such as Marxism, communism, pacifism, and internationalism were anti-nationalist and reflected a dangerous, racially based Jewish intellectualism. In 1931, the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state) established a Race and Settlement Office to conduct race "research" and to determine the suitability of potential spouses for members of the SS. After the Nazis came to power, they passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which codified a supposedly biological definition of Jewishness.

Nazi racists viewed the mentally and physically ill as blemishes upon the genetic landscape of the so-called master race and, when they reproduced, as a biological danger to the purity of the Aryan race. After careful planning and data collection during the last six months of 1939, German physicians began to murder disabled residents of institutions throughout Germany in an operation that they euphemistically called "euthanasia".

According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other northern Europeans were "Aryans," a superior race. During World War II, Nazi physicians conducted bogus medical experiments seeking to identify physical evidence of Aryan superiority and non-Aryan inferiority. Despite killing countless non-Aryan prisoners in the course of these experiments, the Nazis could not find any evidence for their theories of biological racial differences among human beings.

During World War II, the Nazi leadership set about what they referred to as an "ethnic housecleaning" in the occupied Eastern territories of Poland and the Soviet Union. This policy included the murder and annihilation of so-called enemy "races," including the genocide of European Jews and the destruction of the leadership of the Slavic peoples. Nazi racism produced murder on an unprecedented scale.

Further Reading

Back, Les, and John Solomos, editors. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Hutton, Christopher M. Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology, and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

Mosse, George L. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. London: Thames Methuen, 1991.

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