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"Racial Issue" as Core of Nazi Ideology, Silberklang’s View and…
"Racial Issue" as Core of Nazi Ideology
Nazi Racial Ideology
Belief in Aryan supremacy; Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others deemed biologically inferior
Nazi worldview was totalizing, seeing history and politics through a racial lens
Use of eugenics and racial “engineering” to “purify” society
Silberklang’s Interpretation
Argues Nazi ideology is fundamentally racial/biological, not merely political or economic
Emphasis on antisemitism as structural, not instrumental or subordinate
Frames Nazi antisemitism as central to their entire worldview, not a side issue
From Beliefs to Action
Lebensraum (“living space”) in Eastern Europe driven by racial expansionism (needed land exclusively for Germans)
Foreign policy decisions prioritized racial goals over traditional geopolitical ones (e.g. Barbarossa as racial crusade, not strategic error)
Racial hierarchy justified dominance and conquest of “subhuman” groups
Concrete Foreign Policy Outcomes
Operation Barbarossa (invasion of USSR) as ideological war against Slavs and Bolshevism, not simply geostrategic expansion
Establishment of Reich Commissariats (e.g. Ostland, Ukraine) to Germanize or suppress native populations per racial classifications
Anschluss, Sudetenland annexation, Poland invasion: aimed at uniting “racially German” territories and conquering “inferior” peoples
Consequences & Feedback Loop
Foreign policy successes in expansion reinforce belief in racial worldview → more radical racial policies at home and abroad
Eisdeutsch policy tied to racial social engineering and eugenics at home (forced sterilization, euthanasia) as part of broader racial purity agenda
Pogroms, genocide, forced relocation, colonization: all instruments of racial policy
Silberklang’s View and Analysis
Silberklang argues that Nazi foreign policy was driven by racial ideology, not traditional political or economic goals. He emphasizes that antisemitism was central to the Nazi worldview, shaping decisions like the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union as racial wars. For Silberklang, foreign policy was an extension of the Nazis’ belief in racial hierarchy and the need to create a racially pure empire. However, I personally like more Prof Dan Michman's decomposal of the motifs for the Nazis to hate the Jews, how they indirectly caused everything the Nazis hate: equality and communism/socialism.