One of the many terms that’s found its way into the lexicon of Zionism is “self-hating Jew”.

It the expression these folk use when they’d really like to call someone an “‘anti-Semite” – but they can’t get away with that because the target of their wrath happens to be Jewish.

For Zionists, “anti-Semitism” is probably the worst thought-crime imaginable . Ivory Towers throughout the western world, along with the US State Department itself in all its imperial splendour, have assembled large teams of grown men and women whose working lives are dedicated to combatting this terrible menace. They labour lest once again half a dozen million innocent lives are sacrificed in a frenzy of irrational, inexplicable, incomprehensible hatred.

I digress, but it’s struck me, ever since I took the trouble to become more familiar with the fables of World War Two, how debilitating the diseased emotion of “anti-Semitic hate” must be.

Northern Germany during World War Two. Having developed a far more substantial capacity for saturation bombing than Germany, the British leadership used it ruthlessly

Take Elie Wiesel, for example, grand-daddy of the surviving Holocaust survivors, a man widely admired as a Semite who, against all odds, survived the most anti- of anti-Semites at extremely close quarters and lived to tell the tale. As Mr Wiesel was, according to his own account, a resident of Auschwitz towards the end of the war, I wonder why didn’t his anti-Semitic German guards simply throttle him when they had the chance? They must have been too consumed by hatred to squeeze a trigger, or even use a karate chop. Hate like that must positively hurt!

More curious still, why did Mr Wiesel, again by his own account, choose to march out of Auschwitz with his Nazi guards – rather that linger a few days for the Red Army liberators to arrive? At any moment, one might have thought, a veangeful anti-Semite could have come out of his stupor of hate sufficiently to at least stick a pin in Eli or his dad. But no -  the lamb chose to troop off with the lion, rather than await the liberating gazelles. A strange decision, strangley vindicated by history. Here’s what he writes is his famous book Nuit (Night):

“The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him (his father) entered as a patient or nurse. Or else we could follow the others. “Well, what shall we do, father?” He was silent. ‘Let’s be evacuated with the others,’ I told him.

It also occurs to me that if the warriors who accompanied Elie Wiesel and his sickly father on their march westwards were so consumed by hate that they were unable to actually do anything about it, perhaps that’s why Germany lost the war?

The British are a different breed.  Unlike Germans, Britons specialise in fighting just wars. Once at war, the Brits don’t mess around with half measures in a stupor of hate. They fight like hell – in a happy fusion of righteous might and mighty righteousness!

On paper, the British have started an awful lot of wars. But what’s truly awesome is that all these wars have actually been designed to keep the peace. The British often round up some of the losers they’ve attacked and put them on trial as “war criminals”. It’s a sport that was launched, in its modern form, at Nuremberg. Like many modern phenomena, it came about as a cultural compromise. Churchill apparently expressed a desire to “shoot the lot” of the Nazi leadership, but a well-known, rather shocked civil libertarian called Joseph Stalin insisted on the due process of a trial. And so it was.

There’s a direct line of historical and ‘moral’ continuity from Nuremberg to the attempt, currently underway, to arraign Muhammar Ghadafi before the International Criminal Court for his alleged “crimes against humanity”.

Once again, the British have started a war against another nation that was actively trying to be friends at the time. Once again, it is bombing the target nation in a one-sided delivery of massive carnage and destruction. Once again, it brushes aside all peace proposals and insists on its ‘right’ to keep fighting  Once again, it intends to put the leadership of the resisting nation on trial for “war crimes”.

There is, quite possibly, a special place in hell reserved for the British.

Hitler, Stalin and Churchill have all passed on to the after-life and we mortals can only speculate on their ultimate fate. But as a “self-hating Anglo”, I have my own theory.

Dick Cheney at the Pearly Gates

I believe that in 1945, when Adolf Hitler arrived at the Pearly Gates, a stern looking St Peter inquired why he should even consider letting Adolf inside. He’d already heard that the applicant was the worst “anti-Semite” in history, a man who’d murdered six million Jews, then cunningly arranged for the evidence to be destroyed. “I was kind to animals” Hitler said in mitigation, but was forced to admit he’d suicided with his girlfirend “although we did get married first.”

St Peter shook his head. He feared there was no place in Heaven for the likes of Hitler… but after consulting with the All-Seeing Almighty, the former dictator was permitted to enter Heaven after all, where he remains to this day. Hitler’s main chore, assigned after taking his history into account, is restoration of the heavenly archives. As a treat, he’s allowed to paint heavenscapes on Saturdays and Eva visits often for conjugal reunions.

In 1953, another departed soul arrived at the entrance to Heaven. His name was Jo Stalin. He looked uncomfortable at the Pearly Gates, like a man who’s showed up at the wrong party. He explained to St Peter that, a confirmed atheist throughout his adult life, he’d clambered to the top of his God-hating party by being even more of a vicious murderer than his peers – and that he’d played chess with the lives of millions to satisfy his increasingly cynical geopolitical amibitions and lust for absolute power. He was a bit embarrassed about the show trials too. Stalin explained that if he’d known at the time that God was always watching, he’d have taken more care forging the evidence.

St Peter was very doubtful that Heaven was the place for the Soviet dictator, but did agree to consult God before an eternal decision was taken. After an instant’s thought, the All-Merciful took pity on Stalin, forgave his lack of faith, irrepressible deviousness and horrific misdeeds and allowed Jo into heaven, where he now passes endless time polishing the wings of angels in a state of astonished, blissed-out adoration. For intellectual stimulation, he also pusues a long-standing interest in theoretical linguistics.

Several more years passed. Finally, in 1965, Sir Winston Churchill arrived at the entrance to Heaven. He exuded confidence, but also seemed rattled. Winston had left his cigars behind. He was incovenienced by the absence of servants.

And screw you too, sir!

“I’ll have a double whiskey for now, there’s a good chap” he said breezily to St Peter, snapping his fingers in  impatience. “I expect you have quite a mansion waiting for me in there”.

St Peter was unfazed. “Who are you?” he asked. “Why do you think you should get into Heaven?”

Unaccustomed to obscurity, the astonished hero explained that he was the Greatest Englishman of all time, the Man of the Century, an audatious leader of the British Empire in several just wars and the champion of the entire Free World in the greatest conflict the world had ever known. As well as saving civilization, Winston concluded,  I’ve been an first-class artist, an accomplished orator, a brilliant writer, a great wit, historian, commentator – and a famous humanitarian!

At that moment God made one of His historically rare  appearances at the Gateway to Heaven. (In fact, the only other occasion was when He’d personally booted out The Devil himself, shortly after the Big Bang.)

“One question!” boomed the Lord of Lords.

“Are you a Christian?”

Puffing out his chest and pulling on his waitcoat tails, Sir Winston Chuchill explained that he was, indeed, a Christian. He was about to say more when a trapdoor opened and Winston Churchill fell shrieking into a pit, deep inside the bowels of Hell, filled with boiling meths in a choking, detestable atmosphere of stale cigar smoke.

The adoring Gatekeeper looked on the face of the Almighty in search of Enlightenment

“Are you not All-Loving?” St Peter inquired of His God.

“As It Happens, I do forgive most things” replied the Almighty.

He paused for dramatic effect.

“But that guy… is a fucking hypocrite!”

Plucky ‘anti-Nazi’ activists at Exit-Deutschland, ever-vigilant lest there be any recurrence of World War Two, have come up with a new stunt that’s made news on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Guardian explains:

This T-shirt can change - and so can you! (a good wash is mostly all it takes)

Rightwing rock fans at a nationalist music festival in eastern Germany were taken by surprise when souvenir T-shirts they were given were emblazoned with a secret anti-extremist message.

The slogan on the shirts first read “hardcore rebels” along with a skull and nationalist flags. But once the T-shirts were washed, the tagline turned into a message from a group offering to help far-right extremists break away from the neo-Nazi scene.

“If your T-shirt can do it, you can do it too – we’ll help you get away from right-wing extremism,” reads the slogan on the shirts after their first washing.

This is, of course, great publicity for Exit-Deutschland. But does it actually achieve anything? Are teenagers who witnessed their T-shirts change over-night really likely to amend their political opinions accordingly?

It’s possible, I suppose… many things are possible. But I think it rather unlikely. Much more likely it’ll piss the kids off severely and/or trigger an aversion to washing their shirts.

The main application for this engaging new technology, or it seems to me, is for use in personal payback between jilted lovers, within dysfunctional families and that kind of thing. Random acts of petty spite.

Imagine the T-shirt that announces your elder sister is a slut (on her back) on the second day of her school trip. Jocks that mention a cheating husband is syphilitic. A special Darwin T-shirt for atheist friends, which morphs into ‘Jesus Saves!’ the morning after.

I’d also like to hand out attractively designed army recruitment T-shirts to local school-kids - the type that show off the glory, excitement and technology of war – until mum gives them a wash, after which they display its monstrously ugly consequences.

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’.

If you follow politics, you’ve probably heard plenty of politicians complaining about the lies of their opponents.

It’s a staple diet of democratic political discourse. Does a day go by when Parliament (or Congress) is in session in which copious accusations of lying aren’t hurled across the chamber? If so, I must have missed them.

Arlen Specter: these days, he a Senatorial liar; Adolf would not have been surprised

But how many politicians do you know who admit to telling lies? Telling lies themselves, that is – and not just lies but really big lies. Politicians like that are certainly unusual.

I’ll thicken the plot. How many politicians do you know who brag about telling really big lies in a best selling book published before their political career gets underway? Such a politician would be rare indeed.

Yet that’s what a lot of people seem to believe about Adolf Hitler. If they don’t actually believe this, they certainly like to make out they do.

Take this quotation, which has become famous thanks to its frequent repetition on the Internet:

“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.

Yuk! What a nasty mind! (In case don’t know already, those are the words of Adolf Hitler, written in his semi-autobiographical book ‘Mein Kampf’, published in the mid 1920s).

Adolf Hitler: according to legend, the politician who bragged about lying

It’s astonishing, when you think about it, that Hitler got away with boasting about all the Big Lies he was about to tell. How did he still get so many votes? Did Germans 70 years ago admire politicians who brazenly admitted they were huge liars? Amazing!

Actually, it is amazing – too amazing by half. In fact, it’s nonsense.

The quoted words of Hitler are authentic enough (it’s a translation into English from the original German). But some rather significant context is missing…

Here’s the paragraph that follows… in the same translation of Mein Kampf, as provided by Wikipedia:

“From time immemorial. however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.”

Ah – now the famous quotation makes more sense! Hitler wasn’t talking about his own lies at all. Like most politicians, he was complaining about other peoples’ lies. That’s a lot more plausible!

As of today, a Google search for the first paragraph alone (in red) – inside inverted commas so the search is for the exact text – returns 384 results. By contrast, a search for the second paragraph alone returns 4 results. Clearly, a lot of people are quoting Hitler’s words about ‘the Big Lie’ out of context. About 100 to 1 on that count!

World War Two: it ended in 1945, as anyone left in Hiroshima can explain

It’s hardly surprising when this kind of thing happens in wartime. Propaganda against Hitler was to be expected during World War Two. But why propagandize against a man who died over 60 years ago? Rather odd, don’t you think?

It’s clear when searching for instances of this notorious quotation that many of the folk who repeat it are Jewish. That strikes me as even odder. Surely they’d do well to stop quoting from that particular page of Mein Kampf? Hitler was, after all, being very rude about them – as the smallest amount of research makes apparent.

Now, for pointing out such elementary and easily verifiable facts in today’s ‘western world’, it’s customary to be branded a ‘Fascist’ or ‘neo-Nazi’’. That really just demonstrates how far rational discourse has been debased by slavish conformism to one particular, absurdly biased, historical narrative.

Just in case I’d latched onto a statistical artifact, I found another version of the same quotation, this time in the Jewish Virtual Library. The words are essentially the same, but the punctuation is different and in this instance the two paragraphs are collapsed into one.

All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.

The Warren Commission's absurd 'magic bullet' lie

Once again, I did a Google search for the first part of the text (shown in red above) – then the second half (in blue). On this occasion, Google returned 385 and 16 results respectively.

I rest my case – or to coin a phrase from Gerald Posner, ‘Case Closed‘

Posner, for those who haven’t heard of him before, is a truly epic liar of our own era.

He’s the man who still promotes the risible ‘magic bullet’ theory – a recycled lie originated by fellow-liar Arlen Specter, formerly adviser to the 1964 Warren Commission. In the early 1990s, he wrote Case Closed – a book that supposedly vindicates the Warren Commission’s verdict on the Kennedy assassination.

These days, Specter is a US Senator who lies often and unremittingly, mainly for the benefit of the military industrial complex and the Israel Lobby…

An Ethiopian Jew: does his genome have more in common with Simon Peres' than mine?

Incidentally, Zionists are very well-represented among those people on earth who still believe what I suggest might appropriately be called Hitler’s mistake (not all lies are deliberate – sometimes misinformation is spread by people who don’t know better).

By what conceivable stretch of the imagination are Jews a ‘race’? (whatever ‘race’ actually means). Compare and contrast Jewish folk from Ethiopia or India with Jews from Sweden or Lithuania? Can you spot the difference? Me too.

Apparently, Hitler couldn’t. But many folk believed strange things three quarters of a century ago.*

In modern civilized society, we expect ideas to evolve and become more factually-based over time. It’s a natural process… but of course, it’s a process impeded by the incessant repetition of one-sided untruths.

______________________________________

Footnote *

In fairness to Hitler (a rare trait in the 21st Century), I suspect the word he used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews was ‘Volk‘.

Should this really be translated into English as ‘race’?

This is what today’s Wikipedia has to say on the translation into English of the word ‘Volk’ – and its changing usage over time (emphasis added):

Background

In German the word Volk can have several different meanings, such as folkpeople in the ethnic sense, and nation. (simple people), people in the ethnic sense, and nation.

German Volk is commonly used as the first, determing part (head) of compound nouns such as Volksentscheid (plebiscite, lit. “decision of/by the people”) or Völkerbund (League of Nations), or the car manufacturer Volkswagen (literally, “people’s car”).

19th century and early 20th century

A number of völkisch movements existed prior to World War I. Combining interest in folklore, ecology, occultism and romanticism with ethnic nationalism, their ideologies were a strong influence on the Nazi party, which itself was inspired by Adolf Hitler’s membership of the Deutsche ArbeiterparteiMein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler’s seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Weimar Republic. (German Workers’ Party), even though Hitler in even though Hitler in Mein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler’s seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the Weimar Republic. himself denounced usage of the word

Nazi era

During the years of the Third Reich, the term Volk became heavily used in nationalistic political slogans, particularly in slogans such as Volk ohne RaumVölkischer Beobachter (“popular observer”), an NSDAP party newspaper. Also the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One people, one country/empire, one leader”); and the compound word Herrenvolk, translated as “master race”. — “(a) people without space” or

Even though Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf often erroneously applied specific biological and zoological terms such as race, species, and others, the Nazi-era use of Volk could not, depending on context, be interpreted as “race”, “Germanic”, or “European.” In Nazi propaganda, several peoples made up a race, so these two terms did not denote the same thing during the Nazi years. The German people was considered part of the Germanic race which latter officially included the Scandinavians, the English, and the Dutch as well (while Hitler himself also included the Celts), so Volk did not equal Germanic either. Nazi-era publications on pre-history only differed whether their Germanic race equalled the Indo-European race or the Germanic race itself was part of a family of Indo-European races, since indogermanisch is the common German term for Indo-European.

Today

Because Volk is the generic German word for “people” in the ethnic sense today as well as for “people entitled to vote” (Wahlvolk), its use does not necessarily denote any particular political views in post-1945 Germany. However, because of its past, the word is rarely used with Bevölkerung (“population”) serving as a substitute.