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Untermensch (German pronunciation: [ˈʔʊntɐˌmɛnʃ] ⓘ; plural: Untermenschen) is a German language word literally meaning ‘underman’, ‘sub-man’, or ‘subhuman‘, which was extensively used by Germany’s Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against “the masses from the East”, that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles, Belarusians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians and Serbs).[2][3]
The term was also applied to “Mischling” (persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry) and black people.[4] Jewish, Slavic, and Romani people, along with the physically and mentally disabled, as well as homosexuals and political dissidents, and, on rare instances, POWs from Western Allied armies, were considered Untermenschen who were to be exterminated[5] in the Holocaust.[6][7] According to the Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population of East-Central Europe was to be reduced in part through mass murder in the Holocaust for Lebensraum, with a significant amount expelled further east to Siberia and used as forced labour in the Reich. These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy.[8]
Etymology
The term “under man” was introduced by the American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard in his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[9] Stoddard applies the term to those who he considers unable to flourish in civilization due to their inferior heredity (“The word inferior has, however, been so often employed as a synonym for degenerate that it tends to produce confusion of thought, and to avoid this I have coined a term which seems to describe collectively all those kinds of persons whom I have just discussed. This term is The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives”. (p. 23)). Therefore, the term has no racial connotations. Indeed, in his book Stoddard maintains that without eugenics any and all civilizations – irrespective of race, time and geography – have been, are and inevitably will be prone to gradual degradation. The Nazi Party later used the term in propaganda, possibly influenced in part from the title of the book’s German edition Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[10]
The German word Untermensch had been used in earlier periods, but it had not been used in a racial sense, for example, it was used in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, into English, Untermensch is usually translated as “subhuman”. The leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European “under man” to Stoddard was Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to communists of the Soviet Russia, wrote in his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930) that “this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” [“…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete.”][12] It needs to be mentioned though that despite Nazi official support for The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Rosenberg’s prominent role in promoting Nazi ideology Adolf Hitler declared that it was not to be considered official ideology of the Nazi Party[13] and he privately described the book as “mysticism” and “nonsense”.[14] Albert Speer claimed that Goebbels mocked Alfred Rosenberg.[15] Goebbels also called the book a “philosophical belch”.[16][17][18]
It is possible that Stoddard constructed his “under man” as an opposite of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Übermensch (superman) concept. Stoddard does not explicitly say this, but he critically refers to the “superman” idea at the end of his book (p. 262).[9] Wordplays with Nietzsche’s term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and roots almost at will in order to create new words, this development can be considered logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der Stechlin.[19] Nietzsche used Untermensch at least once in contrast to Übermensch in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882).[20] Earlier examples of Untermensch include Romanticist Jean Paul using the term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan (Chapter “8. Hundposttag”).[21]
Nazi propaganda
In a speech which he delivered to the Bavarian regional parliament in 1927, the Nazi Party propagandist Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, used the term Untermensch referring to the communists of the German Bavarian Soviet Republic:
It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament.[22]
The Nazi party and thereafter also the regime (1933—1945) repeatedly used the term Untermensch in writings and speeches which they directed against the Jews. In the pamphlet “The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization”, published in 1936, Himmler wrote:
We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.[23][24][25]
In his speech “Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus” (“World danger of Bolshevism”) in 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that “subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent“.[26] At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels also declared that, “Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.”[27]
The most notorious example of the usage of the term Untermensch by the Nazis is a Schutzstaffel (SS) brochure entitled “Der Untermensch [de]“, distributed by the Reich Security Main Office under the directives of Heinrich Himmler.[28] Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa, it is around 50 pages long and consists, for the most part, of photos portraying the natives of Eastern Europe in an extremely negative way. Nearly four million copies of the pamphlet were printed in the German language and distributed across German-occupied territories. The contents of the “Der Untermensch” brochure extensively emphasized Himmler’s racist demonization of Russians as “bestial untermenschen” and Jews as “the decisive leader of untermenschen“.[29] It was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and seven other languages. It gives the following definition of an Untermensch:
The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being. Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside this being is a cruel chaos of wild, unrestrained passions, nameless desire for destruction, the most primitive desires, the most naked meanness.[clarification needed]