If you’re under 75 years old and grew up in a ‘western’ country, chances are you remember from childhood that one of the things that made the Nazis especially wicked was their notion of ‘racial’ supremacy and Hitler’s lunatic ambition to spawn a ‘Master Race’.

Whether via my parents, school education, books, comics, movies or the mass media – from a fairly early age I absorbed the notion that under Adolf Hitler’s leadership, the Nazis – and they alone – sought to promote their ‘race’ to superdude status.

Wicked Uncle Adolf: we learnt at school that he wanted a Master Race, of people like him (with blonde hair)

I can’t recall the number of times I’ve heard reasoning along the following lines:

The Nazis believed the Aryans are a Master Race and wanted to lord it over the rest – didn’t they?

That’s why we had to fight them to the end – wasn’t it?

Sure, the 60 million or so deaths (and tens of millions of refugees) of World War Two were a lot of ‘collateral damage’ – but it was all worth it, wasn’t it?

After all, we can’t take chances with nutcases who want to take over the world – can we? Thank heavens for Winston Churchill! etc. etc.

It’s scary, persuasive stuff that may well have convinced all but the most recalcitrant pacifists to join the military struggle against Nazi Germany.

That’s doubtless why Anglo-American propaganda worked hard, during World War Two, to promote these anxieties.

But what basis did the western propagandists have for their claims? Is it true that the Nazi leadership promoted the notion of an Aryan ‘Master Race’? Where’s the evidence?

I used to think it was unquestionably true – and was sure there was plenty of evidence. Then I researched the topic a little. Now I’m not so sure at all.

A good place to start, when looking for information on a hot-button political issue such as this, is Wikipedia. It’s never a good place to end, as it is often heavily biased, factually inaccurate, subject to change at any moment – and it’s ultimately edited by anonymous people who, for all I know, could be Winston Churchill’s great-grandchildren. But Wikipedia is a good place to start. That’s where the mainstream conformist view of the day is likely to be articulated…

Sure enough, Wikipedia has an entry on Master Race. This is the summary tet which appears at the top of the entry, as of today:

The master race (German: die Herrenrasse, das Herrenvolk (help·info)) was a concept in Nazi ideology, which holds that the Teutonics (including the Nordic peoples), one of the branches of what in the late 19th and early 20th century was called the Aryan race, represent an ideal and “pure race“. It derives from 19th century racial theory, which posited a hierarchy of races placing Aboriginal Australians and so-called “African savages” at the bottom of the hierarchy^{[citation needed]} while Northern Europeans (namely the Germanic peoples) at the top.

It’s a summary I might have written myself back in high school, if asked to define the Nazi’s concept of ‘Master Race’. Germans on the top, blacks on the bottom – Nazis wanting to enslave the Untermenschen… that’s what I remember learning, all those years ago.

But glancing through the body text of Wikipedia’s entry, I find no references to speeches or written documents by leading Nazis in which they spell out their ‘Master Plan’ for a ‘Master Race’ to the populace. I turn to the discussion page, often the most informative bit of a Wikipedia entry. Scanning down, I eventually find one entry that directly addresses my question. It’s the very last one as of today. It carries the sub-title: ‘Any Proof?’

This is what it says:

Any Proof?

I hereby challenge the claim that the term master race or German: Herrenrasse was a concept in Nazi ideology. I claim it was not but rather a propaganda term used by the Allies.

Please give proof (original sources) that this term was used in speeches or publications by/of any Nazi leaders between 1933 and 1945. 62.226.30.93 (talk) 15:32, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

As of yet, no-one has replied to this comment…

After a little research of my own, I turned up a webpage authored by the professional translator and revisionist historian Carlos Porter entitled Master Race Note. I won’t quote it all. A couple of extracts will do:

The term “Master Race” is of French origin, and was used by Gobineau. I have been unable to find one single authenticated example of use of the term “Master Race” by National Socialists. [In fact, I can't even find it Gobineau; only in the introduction by somebody else -- "race des seigneurs". The plot thickens.]

One of the witnesses at Nuremberg maintained that he had never heard the term until he appeared in court after the war. The famous falsifier and faker, Hermann Rauschning, repeatedly uses the term “Herrenschicht” (“Master Stratum”, translated into English as “Master Class”) in his famous fake, HITLER SPEAKS, or THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION, a.k.a. HITLER M’A DIT (written one third in French by a ghost writer hired by the Hungarian Jew “Emery Reeves” and translated into German in Paris for the largest cash advance ever paid for a so-called work of “non-fiction”; the other two thirds were faked by Rauschning under the direction of Reeves). Rauschning met Hitler only 4 times and was never alone with him; one of the episodes in the book is borrowed from a famous short story by Guy de Maupassant, LE HORLA. Rauschning had written another book only the year before, entitled THE REVOLUTION OF NIHILISM, in which he never even claimed to have met Hitler more than a few times. This was all forgotten.

Since the term “Master Class” contradicts the National Socialist ideal of a classless society in which “Work Ennobles”, and presumably reflects the Marxist delusion that “fascism is the last phase of bourgeois capitalism”, it may be that the phrase “Master Class” was simply lifted from Rauschning and transformed into “Master Race” by American and British newspapers.

Update 15 September 2008:

Last year, someone gave me approximately 40 hours of National Socialist speeches in MP3 files, taken from a site called http://nsl-archiv.com/Buecher/ (not just Hitler, but also Göbbels, Göring, Hess, Strasser, Röhm and many others). I have listened to all of these and continue to do so, and, as far as I can tell, the term “Master Race” is simply never mentioned…

Mr Porter does acknowledge one case when a Nazi leader allegedly used the term ‘Master Race’. That was in Himmler’s so-called ‘Secret Speech’. But one speech in more than years of the Third Reich is not much evidence, especially when (a) the reference appears to be sarcastic, and (b) there are doubts about the authenticity of the entire speech.

Incidentally, on the same webpage, Carlos Porter also challenges the popular notion that the Nazis plotted a ‘1,000 Year Reich‘:

The adjective “jährig” in German, preceded by a number, refers to how old something is, nothing more. It does not refer to how long something will exist in the future. Ein “zehnjähriges Kind” is a ten-year old child. Ein “Funfzigjähriger” is a man fifty years old. It doesn’t mean he’s going to live fifty years in the future.

The term “tausendjährige Reich” refers to the fact that the First Reich was founded by Charlemagne; the Second Reich by Bismark; and the Third Reich by Hitler.

The Reich, or German Empire, was therefore one thousand years old.

Many countries are a thousand years old; the list is a long one (most countries, in fact).

Portugal is 1000 years old and had an Empire until April 25, 1974, but nobody ever accused them of trying to “conquer the world”. What’s the difference?

Americans keep harping on the term “thousand year Reich”, but forget to inquire what the term “Third Reich” even means. Very careless of them.

Careless indeed! But then, why take any care at all – when a careless myth does the trick?

Although I wrestled briefly with German as a boy, I’ve never learnt the language, a deficiency I regret. I blame the girls of that era, who were far too distracting. Anyhow, it makes it hard to do more than report the views of people who are able to read original German-language documents (yet ‘Holocaust expert’ Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t seem fazed by her reported lack of German; perhaps she has different standards?)

I invite comments on these topics. If anyone has relevant information, please share it here.

I’m more than a little curious to know whether the ‘Master Race’ and ’1,000 Year Reich’ phobias were yet more baseless Anglo-American-Zionist propaganda, cut from the same cloth as the legend of Saddam Hussein’s mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’.