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The whole fixation on Aryan race was less about racial purity than it was about psychological transference. The combination of abusive child rearing practices,
by curun1r 12y ago
The whole fixation on Aryan race was less about racial purity than it was about psychological transference. The combination of abusive child rearing practices, the Treaty of Versailles and the economic depression left many, if not most, Germans very angry with no logical outlet for that anger. Hitler was able to channel that anger towards minority groups, particularly Jews. The other, somewhat controversial theory for why he targeted Jews was the possibility that he was actually 1/8 Jewish and he was targeting the part of himself that he considered shameful.
Regardless, the fixation on the Aryan master race was never about the belief that there should only be one race. It was about needing to feel powerful when others had made them feel victimized. It was the cycle of child abuse played out on an international scale. It didn't need to be ideologically consistent so long as it soothed that hurt that both Hitler and much of the German people felt.
For anyone interested in the psychological explanations for the war, Alice Miller's "For Your Own Good" is any excellent exploration of that subject.
- jonnathanson 12y agoA lot of that is true, but I don't think it's a wholly sufficient explanation. Unfortunately, the "master race" rhetoric served a tidy political purpose, as well, even outside of Germany. Throughout much of European history, there hadn't been a great deal of "German" history to speak of. The peoples we currently recognize as German were fragmented across hundreds (at one point, thousands!) of independent polities and micro-states. These peoples were scattered across a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe, even after the unification of Germany as a nation-state. Hitler was able to play the "Aryan race" card as a pretext to invading and occupying any countries or territories that happened to have German-speaking inhabitants of any appreciable number (Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so forth). Interestingly, his phrasing started off as being more about the "German people" or "German folk." When he set his sights on other quasi-Germanic countries, like Norway and England, he talked about the "master race," a broader and more strategically flexible concept. The "master race" concept also won him a small, but vocal number of adherents in the UK and US, particularly among the upper classes, in which racism and eugenics had become fashionable for a time. No question Hitler's psychology was deeply troubled (and troubling). But it's tough to cleanly separate his personal beliefs from his political opportunism. He seemed to act upon each in almost equal measure.
- mgarfias 12y ago+1 for Alice Miller
- rudolf0 12y agoI think there's a ton of truth to that; for example, the Jews provided a very convenient excuse for the loss of WW 1 and the overall current (perceived) plight of the German people. But I think this common explanation oversimplifies what was clearly a complex issue. Hitler may not have had a concretely defined notion of what was Aryan and what wasn't, but he did have a strong notion of superiority and inferiority, as did most of his followers.