Untermensch (; plural: Untermenschen) is a German-language word literally meaning 'underhuman 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, Ukrainians, Russians and Serbs).
The term was also applied to "Mischling" (persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan ancestry) and black people. The physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, transgender, political dissidents and—on rare instances—POWs from Western Allied armies, were also considered Untermenschen and were to be exterminatedSnyder, Timothy (2011) Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin London:Vintage. pp.144-5, 188 in the Holocaust.Mineau, André (2004). Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi. p. 180. Gigliotti, Simone and Lang, Berel (2005) The Holocaust: A Reader London:Blackwell Publishing. p. 14 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 number expelled farther east to Siberia and used as forced labour in the Reich. These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy.
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. Stoddard applies the term to those whom 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).
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, in 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."] 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 the official ideology of the Nazi Party, and he privately described the book as "mysticism" and "nonsense". Albert Speer claimed that Goebbels mocked Alfred Rosenberg.Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Wien 1969, p. 139 Goebbels also called the book a "philosophical belch".
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). 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. Nietzsche used the term Untermensch at least once in contrast to Übermensch in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882). Earlier examples of Untermensch include Romanticist Jean Paul using the term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan (Chapter "8. Hundposttag").
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:
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:
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".Paul Meier-Benneckenstein, Deutsche Hochschule für Politik Titel: Dokumente der Deutschen Politik, Volume 4, Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, Berlin, 2. ed., 1937; speech held on 10 September 1936; In German: "... das Untermenschentum, das in jedem Volke als Hefe vorhanden ist ...". 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."Goebbels speech at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally
The most notorious example of the usage of the term Untermensch by the Nazis is a Schutzstaffel (SS) brochure entitled "", distributed by the Reich Security Main Office under the directives of Heinrich Himmler. 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". It was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and seven other languages. It gives the following definition of an Untermensch:
Spanish Falangism In Spain, in addition to the term underman, the terms subhuman and degenerate are frequent in speeches and articles, especially from the 1930s. These are words used naturally in the newspapers, without explanations of the specific meaning, so it can be deduced that they were general knowledge. They are terms that increase in intensity during the October Events,Calero, Antonio Mª (1985). "Outubro visto da direita". Em Gabriel Jackson e outros, ed. Outubro de 1934. Cinquenta anos de reflexão . Madri: século XXI. pág. 162-163. and during the civil war.
As the civil war approaches or takes place, there is a divergence in the meaning of subhuman, on the rebel side it acquires a racial/eugenic meaning,Vinyes Ribas, Ricard. CONSTRUYENDO A CAÍN. Ayer, nº 44, 2001, p.p. 227-250FERNÁNDEZ, José Guillermo Fouce, et al. España y sus derechos humanos: una deuda. Revista Digital Universitaria. 01 de julio 2010 • Volumen 11 Número 7 • ISSN: 1067-6079GUZMÁN, Eduardo de, et al. El terror desde el poder. Tiempo de historia. Año VIII, n. 92-93 (1 jul. 1982), p. 32-45 beside ideologic,Fresán Cuenca, F. J. (1). Un ideólogo olvidado: el joven José Antonio Maravall y la defensa del Estado Nacionalsindicalista. Su colaboración en "Arriba", órgano oficial de FET y de las JONS. 1939-1941. Memoria Y Civilización, 6, 153-187. https://doi.org/10.15581/001.6.33779 while on the republican side it is more of a cultural type.
Once the war was won by the rebel side, Francoism, similar to Nazi Germany (and Soviet Russia as well), promoted the idea of creating a new man,Vinyes Ribas, Ricard. Las desapariciones infantiles durante el franquismo y sus consecuencias. International Journal of Iberian Studies, Volume 19, Issue 1, Aug 2006, p. 53 - 7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/ijis.19.1.53/1 which led to the brutal repression of the Spanish population. Gonzalo de Aguilera, the press officer for the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War, made the following classicidal statements to journalist John T. Whitaker:"We have to kill, kill, you know? They are like animals, you know, and we cannot expect them to get rid of the virus of Bolshevism. After all, rats and lice are the carriers of the plague. Now I hope you understand what we mean by the regeneration of Spain... Our programme consists... of exterminating one third of the male population of Spain. That would cleanse the country and get rid of the proletariat. And it is also economically convenient. There will be no more unemployment in Spain, do you understand?"
Policies of Nazi Germany
When faced with increasing military manpower shortages, the Nazi regime used soldiers from some Slavic countries, firstly from the Reich's allies Croatia and SlovakiaAccording to Nazi policy, the Croats were considered more "Germanic than Slavic"; this claim was supported by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić, who maintained the view that the Croatians were the descendants of the ancient Goths along with the view that they "had the Pan-Slav idea forced upon them as something artificial".
Rich, Norman (1974). Hitler's War Aims: the Establishment of the New Order, p. 276–277. W. W. Norton & Company Inc., New York. as well as within occupied territories.Norman Davies. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. Pp. 167, 209. The concept of the Slavs in particular being Untermenschen served the Nazis' political goals; it was used to justify their expansionist policy and especially their aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union in order to achieve Lebensraum, particularly in Ukraine. Early plans of the Nazi officials (summarized as Generalplan Ost) envisioned the ethnic cleansing and extermination of no fewer than 50 million people, who were not considered fit for Germanization, from territories it wanted to conquer in Europe. Nazi planners considered Ukraine's chernozem ("black earth") soil as a particularly desirable zone for colonization.
Eastern Europe
During the war, Nazi propaganda instructed Wehrmacht officers to tell their soldiers to target people whom they considered "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans". In addition, Nazi Germany conducted its warfare against the Soviet Union as a racial war targeting Jews, Romanis, Slavs, and various indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe who were categorized as "untermenschen" in the Nazi ideology. Nazis viewed Russians as animalistic sub-humans who were incapable of mounting any form of collective resistance against a German invasion. Nazi anti-Slavism was also tied to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory; which claimed that Slavs were inferior people controlled by Jews as pawns in their plots against Aryans.