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Nazi Ideology
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Nazism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"National Socialism" redirects here. For other ideologies and groups called National Socialism, see National Socialism (disambiguation).
"Nazi" redirects here. For other meanings, see Nazi (disambiguation).
Nazism (/ˈnaːtsɪzᵊm/ or National Socialism in full[1] (German: Nationalsozialismus), was the ideology and practice of the German Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Usually characterised as an offshoot of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism.
Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and social Darwinism. Germanic peoples (called the Nordic race) were depicted as the purest of the Aryan race, and were therefore the master race. Opposed to both capitalism and communism, it aimed to overcome social divisions, with all parts of a homogeneous society seeking national unity and traditionalism, and what it viewed as historically German territory as well as additional lands for expansion.
The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both internationalist Marxist socialism and free market capitalism. The Nazis sought to achieve this by a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) with the aim of uniting all Germans as national comrades, whilst excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische). It rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle, opposed ideas of class equality and international solidarity, and sought to defend private property and businesses.
The National Socialist Program, adopted in 1920, called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries. In Mein Kampf, written in 1924, Hitler outlined his antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for parliamentary democracy and his belief in Germany’s right to territorial expansion.
In 1933, with the support of more conservative elites, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis gradually established a one-party state, under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirables" elements were marginalised, with several millions eventually imprisoned and killed. Hitler purged the party’s more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives and, after the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in his hands, as Führer or "leader".
The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.[8] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[9] Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.[10][11] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:
Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.[12]
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, initially supported the Nazi Party. His four sons, including Prince Eitel Friedrich and Prince Oskar, became members of the Nazi Party, in hopes that in exchange for their support, the Nazis would permit the restoration of the monarchy.[19]
There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.[20] The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.[20] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[21]
The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels, hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasise both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.[20] Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party gaining power in 1933.[22] Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program.[22] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program. Further, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.[22]
Prior to becoming an antisemite and a Nazi, Hitler had lived a Bohemian lifestyle as a wandering watercolour artist in Austria and southern Germany, though he maintained elements of it later in life.[23]
Hitler took a pragmatic position between the conservative and radical factions of the Nazi Party, in that he accepted private property and allowed capitalist private enterprises to exist as long as they adhered to the goals of the Nazi state. However, if a capitalist private enterprise resisted Nazi goals, he sought to destroy it.[20] Upon the Nazis achieving power, Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction, without Hitler's authorisation.[27] Hitler considered Röhm's independent actions to be violating and threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.[28] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.[28]
Although he opposed communist ideology, Hitler on numerous occasions publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism.[29] Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.[30] While Hitler always intended to bring Germany into conflict against the Soviet Union to gain Lebensraum (living space), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front to crush liberal democracies, particularly France.[29]
During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavism and anti-Habsburg views.[46] From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title, and the model of absolute party leadership.[46] Hitler was also impressed with the populist antisemitism and anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger, who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city used a rabble-rousing oratory style that appealed to the wider masses.[47] Unlike von Schönerer, however, Lueger was not a German nationalist, but a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter.[47]
WHO thinks of this stuff? It is easy to see they are required to stomp out all belief in God to get away with such obnoxious inhumanity and evil intent.
Racial theories and antisemitism:
The concept of the Aryan race, which the Nazis promoted, stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.[48] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages.[48] Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science.[48] Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture.[48]
Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining that certain groups of white people were members of an Aryan "master race" which is superior to other races, and particularly the Semitic race, which they associated with "cultural sterility".[48] Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race, a term which he reserved only for Germanic people.[49][50] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,[49] emphasised the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan (Germanic) and Jewish cultures.[48]
Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.[48] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and antisemitism in Germany.[49] Chamberlain's work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish" spirit of selfishness and materialism.[49] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.[49] The book became popular, especially in Germany.[49] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.[49] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.[51] Madison Grant's work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) advocated Nordicism and proposed using a eugenic program to preserve the Nordic race. After reading the book, Hitler called it "my Bible".[52]
In Germany, the idea of Jews economically exploiting Germans became prominent upon the foundation of Germany, due to the ascendance of many wealthy Jews into prominent positions upon the unification of Germany in 1871.[53] Empirical evidence demonstrates that from 1871 to the early 20th century, that German Jews were overrepresented in Germany's upper and middle classes, while they were underrepresented in Germany's lower class and particularly in the fields of work of agricultural and industrial labour.[54] German Jewish financiers and bankers played a key role in fostering Germany's economic growth from the 1871 to 1913, and such Jewish financiers and bankers benefited enormously from this boom, in 1908 amongst the twenty-nine wealthiest German families with aggregate fortunes of up to 55 million marks at the time, five of which were Jewish, and the Rothschilds were the second wealthiest German family.[55] The predominance of Jews in Germany's banking, commerce, and industry sectors in this time period was very high with consideration to Jews being estimated to have accounted for 1 percent of the population of Germany.[53] This overrepresentation of Jews in these areas created resentment by non-Jewish Germans during periods of economic crisis such as in response to the 1873 stock market crash that resulted in a severe depression.[54] The 1873 stock market crash and ensuing depression resulted in a spate of attacks on alleged Jewish economic dominance in Germany, and antisemitism surged.[54]
At this time period in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt antisemitic and racist themes and was adopted by a number of radical right political movements.[56]
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) was an antisemitic forgery created by the police of the Russian Empire. Antisemites believed it was real, and the Protocol became widely popular after World War I.[57] The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.[58] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward, Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected; that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same, and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology.[59] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.[60]
Hitler himself believed the lies of propaganda, and used them, because they suited his purpose. He blamed them for what he was doing himself.
Using the "stab in the back" legend, the Nazis accused Jews, and other populaces it considered non-German, of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German antisemitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the perennial far right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.
After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans).[104] At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, Romani, and blacks.[105] To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis eventually sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.[106] Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.[106] One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from central and eastern Europe in order to make living space for German settlers.
In Nazi Germany, the idea of creating a master-race resulted in efforts to "purify' the Deutsche Volk through eugenics; its culmination was compulsory sterilization or involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. The name given after World War II for the euthanasia programme is Action T4.[108] The ideological justification was Adolf Hitler's view of Sparta (11th century – 195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:[109][110] Some non-Aryans enlisted in Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht, including Germans of African descent[111] and Jewish descent.[112] The Nazis began to implement "racial hygiene" policies as soon as they came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance.[113] An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. Although some Nazis suggested that the programme should be extended to people with physical disabilities, such ideas had to be expressed carefully, given that some Nazis had physical disabilities, for example one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels, had a deformed right leg.[
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Nazism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"National Socialism" redirects here. For other ideologies and groups called National Socialism, see National Socialism (disambiguation).
"Nazi" redirects here. For other meanings, see Nazi (disambiguation).
Nazism (/ˈnaːtsɪzᵊm/ or National Socialism in full[1] (German: Nationalsozialismus), was the ideology and practice of the German Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Usually characterised as an offshoot of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism.
Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and social Darwinism. Germanic peoples (called the Nordic race) were depicted as the purest of the Aryan race, and were therefore the master race. Opposed to both capitalism and communism, it aimed to overcome social divisions, with all parts of a homogeneous society seeking national unity and traditionalism, and what it viewed as historically German territory as well as additional lands for expansion.
The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both internationalist Marxist socialism and free market capitalism. The Nazis sought to achieve this by a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) with the aim of uniting all Germans as national comrades, whilst excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or of a foreign race (Fremdvölkische). It rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle, opposed ideas of class equality and international solidarity, and sought to defend private property and businesses.
The National Socialist Program, adopted in 1920, called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries. In Mein Kampf, written in 1924, Hitler outlined his antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for parliamentary democracy and his belief in Germany’s right to territorial expansion.
In 1933, with the support of more conservative elites, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis gradually established a one-party state, under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirables" elements were marginalised, with several millions eventually imprisoned and killed. Hitler purged the party’s more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives and, after the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in his hands, as Führer or "leader".
The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.[8] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[9] Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.[10][11] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:
Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.[12]
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, initially supported the Nazi Party. His four sons, including Prince Eitel Friedrich and Prince Oskar, became members of the Nazi Party, in hopes that in exchange for their support, the Nazis would permit the restoration of the monarchy.[19]
There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.[20] The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.[20] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[21]
The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels, hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasise both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.[20] Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party gaining power in 1933.[22] Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program.[22] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program. Further, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.[22]
Prior to becoming an antisemite and a Nazi, Hitler had lived a Bohemian lifestyle as a wandering watercolour artist in Austria and southern Germany, though he maintained elements of it later in life.[23]
Hitler took a pragmatic position between the conservative and radical factions of the Nazi Party, in that he accepted private property and allowed capitalist private enterprises to exist as long as they adhered to the goals of the Nazi state. However, if a capitalist private enterprise resisted Nazi goals, he sought to destroy it.[20] Upon the Nazis achieving power, Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction, without Hitler's authorisation.[27] Hitler considered Röhm's independent actions to be violating and threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.[28] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.[28]
Although he opposed communist ideology, Hitler on numerous occasions publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism.[29] Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.[30] While Hitler always intended to bring Germany into conflict against the Soviet Union to gain Lebensraum (living space), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front to crush liberal democracies, particularly France.[29]
During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavism and anti-Habsburg views.[46] From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title, and the model of absolute party leadership.[46] Hitler was also impressed with the populist antisemitism and anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger, who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city used a rabble-rousing oratory style that appealed to the wider masses.[47] Unlike von Schönerer, however, Lueger was not a German nationalist, but a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter.[47]
WHO thinks of this stuff? It is easy to see they are required to stomp out all belief in God to get away with such obnoxious inhumanity and evil intent.
Racial theories and antisemitism:
The concept of the Aryan race, which the Nazis promoted, stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.[48] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages.[48] Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science.[48] Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture.[48]
Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining that certain groups of white people were members of an Aryan "master race" which is superior to other races, and particularly the Semitic race, which they associated with "cultural sterility".[48] Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race, a term which he reserved only for Germanic people.[49][50] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,[49] emphasised the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan (Germanic) and Jewish cultures.[48]
Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.[48] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and antisemitism in Germany.[49] Chamberlain's work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish" spirit of selfishness and materialism.[49] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.[49] The book became popular, especially in Germany.[49] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.[49] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.[51] Madison Grant's work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) advocated Nordicism and proposed using a eugenic program to preserve the Nordic race. After reading the book, Hitler called it "my Bible".[52]
In Germany, the idea of Jews economically exploiting Germans became prominent upon the foundation of Germany, due to the ascendance of many wealthy Jews into prominent positions upon the unification of Germany in 1871.[53] Empirical evidence demonstrates that from 1871 to the early 20th century, that German Jews were overrepresented in Germany's upper and middle classes, while they were underrepresented in Germany's lower class and particularly in the fields of work of agricultural and industrial labour.[54] German Jewish financiers and bankers played a key role in fostering Germany's economic growth from the 1871 to 1913, and such Jewish financiers and bankers benefited enormously from this boom, in 1908 amongst the twenty-nine wealthiest German families with aggregate fortunes of up to 55 million marks at the time, five of which were Jewish, and the Rothschilds were the second wealthiest German family.[55] The predominance of Jews in Germany's banking, commerce, and industry sectors in this time period was very high with consideration to Jews being estimated to have accounted for 1 percent of the population of Germany.[53] This overrepresentation of Jews in these areas created resentment by non-Jewish Germans during periods of economic crisis such as in response to the 1873 stock market crash that resulted in a severe depression.[54] The 1873 stock market crash and ensuing depression resulted in a spate of attacks on alleged Jewish economic dominance in Germany, and antisemitism surged.[54]
At this time period in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt antisemitic and racist themes and was adopted by a number of radical right political movements.[56]
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) was an antisemitic forgery created by the police of the Russian Empire. Antisemites believed it was real, and the Protocol became widely popular after World War I.[57] The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.[58] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward, Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected; that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same, and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology.[59] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.[60]
Hitler himself believed the lies of propaganda, and used them, because they suited his purpose. He blamed them for what he was doing himself.
Using the "stab in the back" legend, the Nazis accused Jews, and other populaces it considered non-German, of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German antisemitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the perennial far right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.
After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans).[104] At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, Romani, and blacks.[105] To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis eventually sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.[106] Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.[106] One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from central and eastern Europe in order to make living space for German settlers.
In Nazi Germany, the idea of creating a master-race resulted in efforts to "purify' the Deutsche Volk through eugenics; its culmination was compulsory sterilization or involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. The name given after World War II for the euthanasia programme is Action T4.[108] The ideological justification was Adolf Hitler's view of Sparta (11th century – 195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:[109][110] Some non-Aryans enlisted in Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht, including Germans of African descent[111] and Jewish descent.[112] The Nazis began to implement "racial hygiene" policies as soon as they came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance.[113] An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. Although some Nazis suggested that the programme should be extended to people with physical disabilities, such ideas had to be expressed carefully, given that some Nazis had physical disabilities, for example one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels, had a deformed right leg.[