Racism In Germany

Before tackling the issue of racism in Germany or elsewhere, we first need to be aware of the term “racism” and its origins. According to Professor Marion Kaplan’s lecture, racism is a 15th century idea created following European observations of perceived biological markings. Racism denotes a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority based on factors such as gender, skin tone, and other biological characteristics. The word race stems from Arabic ras, which means beginning, origin, or head (Burleigh 23). Racism connotes external differences in people who are singled out and denigrated for their religion, physical appearance, or socioeconomic status. Racism began before WWII in Germany, but the way the Nazis carried out violence through racism,
Darwin himself did not believe in class divisions. According Michael Burleigh, Darwin was “against slavery and supported the ideas of human equality by avoiding references to lower or higher races” (Burleigh 28). The interpretations of Darwin’s idea varied according to country. For instance, in Germany the “Aryans” represented the superior race to the Jews and other “inferior” groups. Meanwhile, in North America, the Whites represented the superior groups and the African and African-Americans constituted the bottom of the race hierarchy. Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest” applied to nature, but later it was misconstrued to apply to the strongest members of the human society. The Germans appropriated that idea to degrade races based on culture, and physical traits. Both Nazi racism and American racism used skin tone to distinguish individual’s power and position within a society. The difference between the two cultures, on the other hand, is that the Nazis wanted to eradicate everyone who did not fit the “Aryan”
For instance, physician Wilhelm Schallmeyer won first prize in a competition for initiating the rule that a person cannot marry and procreate without going through an examination by a qualified physician (Burleigh 31). Those who failed the exam did not receive a marriage certificate and prohibited from having children. Schallmeyer believed that those who are unfit to reproduce should be sterilized, a dictum that became the basis for Eugenics in America and in Nazi Germany. Many of these scientists’ ideas on purifying society did not stem from scientific research, but from their own prejudice. They did not have any experimental proof that showed a correlation between race and