According to Nazi ideology, an ideal "Aryan" was blond, blue-eyed with athletic features. The term is still tied to Nazi Germany, but its origin lies elsewhere.
Following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the notion of ancestry became more important. From 1935, all German citizens had to provide what was known as an " Ariernachweis " or "Aryan certificate" to prove that their ancestors did not include Jewish or Romani people for at least three generations. Civil servants, doctors and lawyers already had to start providing the " Ariernachweis " in 1933. Time-consuming research was often necessary before citizens could submit their documents to the Reich Office for Genealogical Research (in German, Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung) for verification.
In propaganda films, the Nazis claimed that Jews wanted to destroy the world order and wrest control from the "master race." In caricatures, especially those printed in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer , Jews were portrayed using grotesque and antisemitic tropes, for example with hooked noses and greedy facial expressions. The Nazis used this racist ideology to first systematically exclude Jews and then to murder them.
There were other population groups that the Nazis associated with Aryan features though, especially Nordic and Scandinavian peoples. When the Nazis encountered blond and blue-eyed children in countries such as Latvia or Poland, they had no scruples about kidnapping them and sending them to homes run as part of the "Lebensborn" eugenics program . Some 200,000 of these "racially pure" children ended up in German children's homes. These homes served the purpose of "Germanization" — it was a project developed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi regime's eletie SS guard, who sought to promote the growth of a "racially valuable" population.
The true origin of the 'Aryans' Even though the term Aryan was common in colloquial language, Nazi "race scientists" didn't use it much. Instead, they would refer to "German or kindred blood." They knew the term had originally been used to refer to linguistic similarities and not to inherited physical traits.
Archaeological discoveries show that the term Aryan has existed for more than two millennia. The Persian king Darius I had a rock-cut tomb carved in Naqsh-e Rostam in modern Iran. The inscription reads: "I am Darius, the great king … a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan descent." The word also appears in Sanskrit in sacred texts from India.
Racist reinterpretation of the term The racist reinterpretation of the term Aryan began in the middle of the 19th century. In his four-volume work "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races," French writer and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau divided humanity into three groups, the white, yellow and black races. His conclusion was that the white, Aryan original race was superior to the others, characterized by its "immeasurably superior intelligence," and was destined to rule over the others. He also warned against "racial mixing," as this would endanger both the quality of the Aryan original "race" and humanity as a whole.
Gobineau's theory was largely ignored by his contemporaries but later found traction after being appropriated and altered to serve nationalist, far-right ideology. A large number of scientists and academics subsequently used Gobineau's racial theory as a basis for their own writings on the subject.
One of them was British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain — who would later also become the son-in-law of Richard Wagner . In his 1899 book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," Chamberlain raised Gobineau's racist theories to a new level.
This article was originally published in German.
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