Nazi racial ideology and the manipulation of academic authority

Hitler and the Occult -- Video Summary

Formal Rationalization of Belief Systems

The history of German beliefs about racial purity can be traced back well into the 19th century and long before they manifested themselves in the large-scale rounding up, imprisonment, and murder of millions of innocent civilian men, women, and children. To a certain extent, concepts and beliefs about the origin and supposed superiority of Germanic or "Aryan" people was purely romantic and not necessarily immoral, because it was no different from the analogous ethnocentric beliefs of many native peoples. Even the erroneous scientific and pseudo-scientific beliefs and concepts espoused by late 19th century and early 20th century German anthropologists and lay historians was unremarkable during the period before it was incorporated into a national philosophy that included restoring the so-called "purity" of German blood by the elimination of other so-called "inferior" races.

The Nazis succeeded in cultivating a national obsession with racial purity and insensitivity toward Jews, Slavs, and other races and peoples through gradual indoctrination of the masses using (for the first time) mass electronic media in the form of the radio, then the latest and most revolutionary development in the communication of ideas and ideologies that had ever been devised. In addition to legislating Jews out of public life and higher education through the 1933 Nuremburg Laws, the Nazis employed propaganda films in the form of images and narratives depicting Jews as rat-like vermin spreading across the globe, corrupting superior people in the process. By incorporating established academic authorities into an ancestral heritage preservation arm of Himmler's S.S., the Nazis corrupted their academic credibility to bolster belief in and acceptance of a worldview and an ancestral history that was based in pure fantasy and mythology.

Justifying Genocide in Practice

By the time that millions of Jews were being rounded up and incinerated by the millions throughout Europe, the German people were sufficiently indoctrinated with racial animus toward the Jews and cultural hatred for the Slavic people that ordinary citizens were completely indifferent to the obvious evidence that their government was conducting genocide throughout the European Continent with the full intention of replicating it in Britain and the United States as soon as possible.

Initially, the Nazi hierarchy referred to the systematic imprisonment and murder of Jews only euphemistically as "resettlement in the East" and solving the "Jewish Problem." Not until 1944 when German defeat was imminent did Himmler openly refer to the murder of the Jews in a speech to several hundred German generals. By that time, Himmler was probably hoping to convey a sense of shared responsibility by eliminating any possible or plausible deniability among his Generals, presumably to motivate their renewed commitment to a failing war effort. In that regard, Himmler specifically referred to the "courage" of those capable of doing what was "necessary" and to the fact that one of the curses of greatness was having to advance over dead bodies for the good of the German people.

In retrospect, it is impossible for most German citizens not to have known exactly what was happening to the Jews in their country as many German civilians maintained into modernity. Across Germany, the Rhineland's, and Austria, German citizens witnessed (and participated in) the rampant persecution of Jews in the pre-war years, followed by the systematic (literal) removal of Jews from their shared neighborhoods. German people willingly accepted facile explanations for why their Jewish neighbors were forcibly removed from their homes, their belongings thrown in the street, and non-Jewish Germans granted their homes and apartments.