The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of orders and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race". Nazi eugenics aimed for "racial hygiene" through compulsory sterilization of people they viewed as subhuman (Untermenschen). This policy culminated in the Holocaust.
Under the Nazi appropriation of the term "Aryan", a racial hierarchy was erected with an Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk) at the top. Centuries-long residents of German territories were marked as inferior, including Jews, Romani people, and the vast majority of Slavs.Timm, Annette F. The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2010. 118.Mastny, Vojtechc (1971). The Czechs Under Nazi rule: the Failure of National Resistance, 1939-1942. Columbia University Press. 130f.
The Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy organized the program and extensively published circulars and directives to relevant administrative organs, newspapers, and educational institutes. The major legislation that enacted Nazi racial policy was known as the Nuremberg Laws.
Aryan Master Race
Theorists in the Völkisch movement believed that Germany's Teutonic ancestors spread throughout Europe. Germanic tribes like the Burgundians, Franks, and Western Goths joined with the Gauls to make France. The Lombards moved south and joined with Italians; the Jutes made Denmark; the Angles and Saxons made England; the Flemings made Belgium; and other tribes made the Netherlands.Victor, George. Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, Inc., 2007. 117. Precursors to Nazi racial beliefs can be found in works of writers like Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans F. K. Günther.Evans, Richard J. (2004). The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Press. p. 33f.Steinweis, Alan E. (2006). Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 26.
Nazi racial theory placed human beings on a scale from pure Aryan to non-Aryan Untermensch (subhuman). Their idea of an Aryan master race included Germanic peoples and other Northern Europeans like Scandinavians, Dutch, and English people. Italic peoples were tolerated, and French people were considered suitably Germanic.
At the bottom of the racial scale were Jews, Polish people, Serbs and other Slavs, Romani people, and black people. The Nazis originally sought to rid the German state of Jews and Romani by means of deportation, while black people were to be segregated and eliminated through compulsory sterilization.Gigliotti, Simone and Berel Lang. The Holocaust: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 14.Stephenson, Jill. Hitler's Home Front: The Nazis In The German Countryside. Bloomsbury Academic, 2006.
The Nazis considered Slavs Non-Aryans who were to be expelled, enslaved, or exterminated through the secret Generalplan Ost ("Master Plan East"). Their propaganda suggested any Asiatic Slavs were the results of intermingling with Mongolians and that they were dominated by Jews and Bolsheviks.Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press, 2010.
When the Nazi Party gained power in 1933, they passed the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage which offered a government loan to all newly married Aryan couples. After the birth of each child, a portion of the loan would be forgiven. The goal was to increase birthrates for the racially elite.Maynes, Mary Jo and Ann Waltner. The Family: A World History. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012. 103.
The Nazis also quickly established a eugenics mechanism by passing the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in July 1933. Compulsory sterilization could be forced by the Hereditary Health Court for anyone suffering from an intellectual disability, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, blindness, deafness, "any severe hereditary deformity", and even alcoholism.Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939. Penguin Books, 2006. 507f. The law also enforced sterilization of the "Rhineland bastards", children of German and African parentage.Samples, Susan (1996). "African Germans in the Third Reich". In Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay (ed.). The African German Experience. Praeger Publishers Between 1933 and 1945, 3–400,000 people were sterilized under the law.Campt, Tina. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich. University of Michigan Press, 2006. The policy soon accelerated from sterilization into euthanasia in programs like Aktion T4, which targeted people with disabilities and the mentally ill.
American influence In a 1928 speech about the goals of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler admired the way white men in North America decimated indigenous people through violence and subterfuge.Hitler, Adolf. Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933. Band I: Die Wiedergründung der NSDAP Februar 1925-Juni 1926. München: K.G. Saur, 1992. 161.Kershaw, Ian. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941. Allen Lane, 2007. 386f.Kakel, Carroll P. The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 1. Once in power, the Nazis looked to America as a classic example of a country with racist laws.Rethmeier, Andreas. "Nürnberger Rassegesetze" und Entrechtung der Juden im Zivilrecht. New York: Lang, 1995. 138f. Historians sometimes dismissed the idea that racist policies like American Jim Crow laws provided a template for Nazi legislation, but the influence was always evident.
A Nazi memo from 1933 authored by a team led by Roland Freisler working under Hanns Kerrl pointed to North American race laws as emblematic of Nazi goals. The memo summarized the Völkisch thesis, "The fundamental principle of the egoistic age of the past, that everyone who bears a human countenance is equal, destroys the race and therewith the life force of the Volk. It is therefore the task of the National Socialist state to check the race-mixing that has been underway in Germany over the course of the centuries". As models for this racist program, the memo pointed to medieval expulsions of Jews from European countries as well as Jim Crow laws in the American south.Kerrl, Hanns. Nationalsozialistisches Strafrecht. Denkschrift des Preußischen Justizministers. Berlin: Decker, 1933. 47–49 The Nazis adapted the mechanisms of Jim Crow laws into the Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which stripped Jews of German citizenship.Little, Becky (August 16, 2017). "How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow". History.com. Accessed March 27, 2026.Al-Arshani, Sarah (September 21, 2022). "The Nazis studied US eugenics and Jim Crow laws as a model for their policies. When they were criticized, one historian says, 'they pointed to Mississippi.'". Business Insider. Accessed March 27, 2026.
Jewish racial policies
In 1933, approximately 525,000 Jews were living in Germany, 0.75% of the population.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country". Encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Accessed March 26, 2026. Discrimination against Jews began immediately after the national seizure of power in 1933.Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. The first stumbling block towards making persecution of the Jews an active Nazi policy was defining them. Lawyer Bernhard Lösener described the debate as total chaos. Germans of mixed descent (Mischling) were especially problematic for the party. Various percentages of Jewish heritage were argued as definitive. Politician Achim Gercke felt Jewish ancestry should be the legal threshold.Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Belknap Press, 2003. There was no clear definition when the first antisemitic law was promulgated. The Nazis finally defined a Jew as a person with three or four Jewish grandparents. One or two Jewish grandparents was considered mixed.
On April 1, 1933, a Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was observed throughout Germany. Only six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned Jews from serving in the public sector. Such laws were defended as necessary to prevent the infiltration of damaging, "alien-type" (Artfremd) hereditary traits into the German national or racial community (Volksgemeinschaft).Ehrenreich, Eric. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. The legislation was aimed at reserving privileged positions for Aryan Germans. The exclusion of Jews continued apace, with each new law cementing their status as second-class citizens."M356–2A Civil Affairs Handbook. Germany Section 2A: Government and Administration", Army Service Forces Manual. Headquarters, Army Service Forces. November 3, 1943. 10–2.
On August 25, 1933, the Nazis signed the Haavara Agreement with Zionists to allow German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for a portion of their economic assets.Grimm, Eve E. "Haavara Agreement". In The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 Volumes]. ABC-Clio, 2017. 272f. The agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Nazi Germany. Most Jews fled to Western Europe. By 1939, 60,000 German Jews had emigrated to Palestine.Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperCollins, 2009. 62f.
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws introduced in Nazi Germany on September 15, 1935, at a special session of the Reichstag during the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally. The legislation comprised two measures concerning procreation and citizenship. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45.Whitman, James Q. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press, 2018.Brown, Kellie D. The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation During the Holocaust and World War II. McFarland & Company Inc., 2020. 13. Such partnerships were considered racial pollution (Rassenschande), and the prohibition was soon expanded to Gypsies and black people.Milton, S.H. "'Gypsies' as social outsiders in Nazi Germany". In Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, 2001. 216, 231.Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945. Cambridge University Press, 1991. 49.
The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to those of "German or related blood", reducing others to state subjects without full rights.Wistrich, Robert. Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Routledge, 2002. 74f. The laws were a means of codifying the exclusion of Jews and other "non-Aryan" minorities from citizenship in the Reich, which stripped them of fundamental protections.Bradsher, Greg (Winter 2010). "The Nuremberg Laws: Archives Receives Original Nazi Documents That 'Legalized' Persecution of Jews". Prologue. Vol. 42, No. 4.Lindley, Robin (February 7, 2023). "How the US influenced the creation of Nazi race laws under Hitler", ABA Journal.
The ('representation of the German Jews') called the Nuremberg Laws "the heaviest of blows for the Jews in Germany". They asked for recognition of their autonomy over Jews in Germany. They also stressed the importance of continuing Jewish education traditions, particularly in preparation for emigration to Palestine with a focus on manual labor, Hebrew studies, and vocational training of girls.Yahil, Leni (1998). The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. Oxford University Press. p. 79.