i thought i'd start this video yet again with the kallenberger farming family and if you look at this fight this painting the thing that's really really interesting about it to me is that all of these people look the exact same all these people look the same they all have blonde hair or blondy ginger hair and lots of them in this picture have blue eyes although i appreciate not everybody now this picture yet again can tell us something about what the nazis thought about germany and they thought that in germany there were specific races of people and the nazis had some very bizarre and quite awful ideas about race and it's race that i want to look at in this video now in these videos so far we've been looking at this period pre-war from 1933 to 1939 and we've been looking at different groups of people who and they're changing lives in germany we've looked at workers or women young people and now i'd like to start looking at persecuted groups before we look at persecuted groups it's important we have an understanding about what was their nazi's policy towards different races so today we're going to look at what were the nazis ideas about race and the nazis had some very bizarre ideas about race you can see that in these two posters here and these two posters here were put up throughout germany and these posters here showed that the nazis believed there were six distinct races in germany now all of these people here the nazis consider aryan they consider all of these people aryan but these people here all uh they thought that basically the population you could split the population into groups and these groups of people had the same characteristics so they all looked the exact same way they had the same shape of head the same shape of nose the same color in their eyes and the color in their hair and they thought these distinct people had distinct characteristics now that is we know today a stupid idea and a wrong idea but i think it's important we have this idea that this is what the nazis thought now one really common misconception with this is that the nazis used this term aryan but the biggest common misconception is that people think that aryan just means blonde hair and blue eyes it does not arian means natural german natural german so for the nazis there are distinct types of natural german and aryan means anyone who is a natural german and as you've just seen from that poster the nazis actually believed there were six different types of people who were natural germans now putting this really really simply the nazis really thought that in terms of human people there were two distinct groups there were ubermensch people now ubermensch means superhumans okay and they believed these people were strong intelligent uh clever people and uber mensch were these aryan people so the aryans were ubermensch they were the superhumans who they thought should be running their country now on the reverse of that the nazis also believed that the other half of the human race were unto mensch now unto mench translates us and they believed that there were groups of people who were sub-human people who were physically not strong who were not intelligent who were evil in some ways now that is the most bizarre thing to properly somebody living in the modern world that people would think in this way that there are two distinct groups one group who are good and one group who are bad we know now that that is ridiculous but it's important that we have an understanding about what the nazis thought about it now this uber mensch group you can see portrayed in nazi propaganda at the time so you can see it in their statues for example this one in the middle where this man is killing a snake he's muscular he's strong you can see it in statues from the statue on the bottom left from the olympics where again somebody is physically very strong you can see it in their propaganda pictures of this man at the beach with his blonde head wife and their baby you can see it in the poster at the bottom for the hitler youth and you can see it in the poster that we've already looked at in terms of race so the ubermensch people were strong the unto men's group they believed were not and the nazis thought a lot of different people were unto mensch they thought jews were unto mention its jews will look at in a bit more depth next they thought disabled people they thought that people were mental health issues they thought that slavic people from the east or they thought that romani gypsies and homosexuals and non-white people were unto mensch now what's really appalling about this is that they also thought that you could tell whether someone was unto mensch by their physical features so here you can see a jewish man having his nose measured because they thought that jewish people had a distinct type of shape of nose and you can see that in the bottom right as well where this child from a children's storybook is teaching the rest of his class about how to recognize a jew that's really really really racist and an appalling thing to do you can see in that bottom left uh sorry picture in the right in the middle at the bottom this is a romani gypsy lady who's having her eyes measured in terms of just to see what color they were because they thought gypsies had a specific type of eye color and you can also see it in this poster on the left here where this man who's got physical disabilities is being basically told that he is unto mensch so really important this idea that the nazis thought you could split the human race into ubermensch people aryans and unto mensch who they thought were subhuman or not even worthy of being a human person now the biggest group by far that faced nazi's persecution were jews and i wanted to go through with you some of the nazi myths about jews and also the reality in germany so the nazis told everybody that there was a long continuous history of anti-semitism or anti-jewish belief in germany and that anti-semitism had been around for centuries actually that wasn't hugely true some anti-semitism was around in the middle ages in the medieval period but actually by 1933 jews in germany were fully integrated into society um due marriages with non-jews were quite common so again there's a myth and there's a reality another nazi myth was that jews were racially inferior the reality was there was completely no scientific evidence to support it there is a single race of human beings now the nazis did get some scientists to try and prove some of these myths but the scientists were questionable and often were paid to do their research the third myth that the nazis uh told everybody is that jeans owned all of the big businesses in germany and they profited from the economic problems of the 1920s and the 1930s so when that great depression happened jews were the people that profited in reality yes some jews did own some big businesses but they didn't own all of them in any way and actually jews belong to all classes of german society from the workers right away up to the upper classes the fourth myth that the nazis spread about the jews was that germany was dominated by jews they controlled the country they controlled the economy they controlled the government in reality that wasn't true at all there were hardly any jews in fact in 1933 in germany there were really only half a million jews out of a population of 67 million so the percentage was very small their influence as a result was limited notably in the previous weinmark government there were a few key ministers who were jewish but they were overwhelmingly not jewish nazi myth five jews were cowards and pacifists the fact that they refused to fight germany in the first world war um led to its defeat that's just not true jews did fight in the german army in the first world war in the same way as other citizens and some jews notably received the iron cross for bravery the last myth is that jews were all communists they'd led the revolution in russia and they'd lead a revolution in germany in reality that wasn't true although some leading communists would use german jews belong to the full spectrum of political parties it's really important you have an understanding of what these nazi racial policies were because in the next video we're going to look at what the nazis did with this policy so what did they do with these ideas what happened to the jewish people and other people who they considered to be unto mensch when this is what they thought about them