Question

What are the peculiar features of Nazi thinking?

Answer 1

• A set of practices and a system of belief were linked to the crimes of the Nazis.
• Hitlers worldview and ideology of Nazi was synonymous.
• As per Nazi ideology, there was only a racial hierarchy and there was no equality between people.
• Jews were at the lowest rung, Nordic German Aryans, blue-eyed, blond people were at the top.
• Jews were regarded as arch-enemies of Aryans.
• Depending upon their external features, all other coloured people were placed in between.
• Hitler borrowed his idea of racism from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin.
• As per arguments of Nazi, the weak should perish and strongest race should survive.
• As per Nazis, Aryan race had to dominate the world, become stronger, and retain its purity.
• Hitlers another ideology was the concept of living space or Lebensraum, a geopolitical concept.
• To enhance the area of the mother country, new territories had to be acquired for settlement.
• This is to enhance the power and material resources of German nation.
• To concentrate all Germans geographically in one place, Hitler intended to extend German boundaries by moving eastwards.
• The laboratory for this experimentation was Poland.
• Only Nordic Aryans were classed by Nazis as ‘desirable’ only they were considered worthy of multiplying and prospering. Nazis wanted a society of only a healthy and pure Nordic Aryans.
• Poles and Russians were considered as people who were undesiring of any humanity, they were considered as subhumans.
• Nazis believed the biological superiority of Aryan race was threatened by blacks and gypsies living in Nazi Germany. Jews were the most persecuted people by the Nazis.
• When parts of Russia and Poland were occupied by Germans, the captured civilians were forced to work as slave labourers. Due to starvation and hard work many people died.
• Jews were segregated, pauperised and terrorised by Nazis from 1933 to 1938.
• Eventually Jews were killed in gas chambers in Poland by concentrating them in certain areas, from 1939 to 1945.