Untermensch is what? Untermensch and Ubermensch

In the days of the Third Reich, under the rule of National Socialism, the term "untermensch" became firmly in use among German citizens. This concept served to denote a vast circle of individuals who, with the easy submission of ideologists, turned from normal people into "lower humanoid beings", in all qualities inferior even to animals. Who are untermenshi? How did they appear? Why was this concept introduced?

How did the term "untermensh" come about?

The word untermensch is translated from German as "subhuman". It appeared in the 1920s thanks to the American racist Lothrop Stoddard.

In his work "The Revolt Against Civilization: The Threat of the Underdog," he wrote with disgust and contempt for the Russian people about his ultimate degradation. From the point of view of the author, he was always an inferior race. And after the October Revolution of 1917 and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the Russian Slavs turned into "masses from the East," with whom the civilized nations will have to fight.

In Stoddard's book, the Communists appear before the reader as real criminals, a kind of destructive barbaric force. Their author defined the word underman, which in literal translation from English means "subhuman."

The book of the American racist was published in Germany. And the term underman in the German version was transformed into untermensch ("untermensch"). This concept was adopted by the ideologist of the NSDAP, Alfred Rosenberg, and introduced him into his work The Twentieth Century Myth, which became the second political bestseller after the work of Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf.

Whom did the Germans classify as non-Germans?

In the ideology of National Socialism, the meaning of the word "untermensh" has undergone some changes. To the subhuman, not only the Bolsheviks, but all Slavs in general, as well as Jews, Gypsies, Mongols, Tatars and other peoples that had no kinship with the Aryan race were included. And her Hitler elevated to the rank of the highest. The Aryans, supposedly creating the entire cultural heritage of the world, could be considered primarily Germans.

And those German citizens who had any defects, were also called non-residents and were persecuted. There was an opinion that the mentally ill, drug addicts, invalids and mischels could spoil the purity of the blood of the Aryans and lead the race of "rulers" to degradation and degeneration. And National Socialism, as Hitler argued, is "the will to create a superman".

Untermensch and Ubermensch

He became the ideal to which the Aryans aspired. The term "superman" ("ubermensh") Hitler borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche. Intellectual and moral ideal, designed to return people the meaning of life, created by the great German philosopher, the Fuhrer endowed with ethnic and ethnic characteristics and presented to the inhabitants of Germany.

He was a superhuman purebred Aryan with blue eyes, indestructible health, excellent physical form, steel will, powerful self-control and an outstanding intellect.

The image created by Hitler was actively cultivated, and his antagonist became an untermensch. This creature, which, according to the pamphlets published by ideologists, represented an unprecedented threat to the Germans. It had to be fought with him. Untermenshey needed to win.

Why were the Slavs and Jews Jews?

Especially fierce hatred was given to Jews. Their Hitler despised and positioned as the culprits of all the troubles of the German people. Jews he dreamed of erasing from the face of the earth. Sly and quirky people, as the Fiihrer inspired the Germans, took into circulation the Russian people, which also belonged to the sub-world of subhuman people.

With the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, he lost the intelligentsia on which the state held. In the tsarist era, according to the instructions of the fascist leader, it existed thanks to the German core of the upper strata of society in Russia. After all, Catherine II, and Peter III by origin were Germans. Germans effectively controlled the country, Hitler claimed, and now their place was taken by the Jews. And they brought only disorganization and chaos. From their domination, the Germans had to rid the Soviet people. The Russians themselves were presented to the inhabitants of Germany as a kind of barbarian tribe, whose direct purpose is to serve the noble and highly developed Aryan race.

As Henry Himmler once claimed, the Germans needed slaves to maintain culture. The Slavs, like the beasts, could become them, and the Aryans, in turn, would provide this "animal" with a worthy existence.

Brochure Der Untermensch

To expose them, the ideologists of the NSDAP even published in 1942 a scandalously known pamphlet "Underdog." On 52 pages of a pamphlet they explained to the citizens of Germany, which means an untermensch.

The main method of influencing the reader was opposition. Photo illustrations of well-to-do Aryans-Europeans were printed next to images of poor old people, gloomy youth, exhausted women, their hungry skinny children and Jews from the ghetto.

The conceptual idea of the pamphlet was that the untermensher was only endowed with external signs of a person: head, legs, hands. But in fact he is a backward, uninfluenced intellect, spiritually and psychologically inferior to the animal, living in a dugout and plowing, like a will, on a Jewish master.

Ideologists claimed that the land that would become a "European California" in the hands of a developed Aryan would be turned into a wasteland because of the untermens. Chaos, unbridled passions and a thirst for destruction rules them. And Jews know about these desires and skillfully use them. Under their leadership, a subhuman-barbarian is going to exterminate the Aryan race. That's what it means to be an untermensch. This was how his ideologists represented the citizens of Germany.

The fate of untermenshey

The subhuman in the era of the Third Reich was doomed to destruction. The "lower" races were subjected to persecution and all kinds of repression. Jews were consistently expelled from the political and economic life of the country and deprived of citizenship. For people of this nationality, ghettos were created, designed to starve to death and disease, as well as concentration camps, where they were destroyed: shot and sent to gas chambers.

Gypsies, like the mentally ill, as well as other "inferior Aryans" were subjected to forced sterilization and exterminated. The death penalty was awarded to the Slavs who entered into sexual relations with representatives of the German population of Germany. Soviet prisoners of war, especially Asians, were tortured and bullied.

The global idea and its background

Apparently, the German nation, humiliated by the results of the First World War and oppressed by the full-scale economic crisis, willingly imbued with the idea of its own greatness and rushed to destroy the "universal evil" invented by Hitler, and to fight the "aggressors", invented by the Führer, in the name of his global Ideas. However, in fact, the goals were different: the conquest of the territories of Eastern Europe and the extermination of nations that hated the fascists, for whom the term "untermensh" was created. This racist-eugenic concept, like the Ubermensch, served as a means for politicians to control the mentality of the masses. And they became only an instrument designed to achieve low goals.