The Creation of the “Aryan Master Race”

This chapter locates the holocaust within the larger context of eugenics and racism that put the Aryan race at the center of civilization and European history. Intellectuals from the Frenchman Count Joseph Arthur de GobineauJoseph Arthur de Gobineau to the American lawyer Madison GrantMadison Grant ascribed all civilizational accomplishments to the Aryan race and explained historical phenomena such as the French Revolution as racial rather than political and social conflicts. At the center of this thinking was the construct of an Aryan race that had emerged somewhere around the Back Sea in prehistoric times and that had later moved into Central Europe. Such racist ideas intersected around 1900 with eugenics and demands for the isolation, sterilization, and killing of people identified as feebleminded. Beginning in the United States, eugenic practices and laws spread to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Here they became intertwined with anti-semitism. Initially, sterilization and euthanasia targeted disabled adults, children, and babies of “Aryan background.” When the euthanasia program was halted in summer of 1941, its technology and personnel was transferred east to the death campsdeath camps under construction in occupied Poland. It became central to the genocide of European Jews.