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I think it's intrinsically suspicious when Holocaust deniers trying to make their case immediately lead off with "here's why the Jews would have deserved the Holocaust if it happened... which it didn't FYI."
Weirdly enough, they bear a familial resemblance to those progressives confidently asserting that Palestinians have a right to engage in armed resistance against their oppressors - but coincidentally, 100% of the Israeli civilians killed on 07/10/23 were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal directive, and any footage clearly depicting Hamas squaddies murdering Israeli civilians is obviously AI-generated.
Yeah, I was struck by that listening to that podcast. They go into all the reasons why Jews are the worst people in existence, and then they use it as a point in how the Germans were truly really great people for not genociding them, even though they would have been completely justified in doing so. I even asked him about "untermensch" and he said it never got written down. Bullshit.
On the progressives point, it never struck him as ironic that he was agreeing with them so much, he just thought this was one instance where they were right.
"Untermensch" was certainly written, unlike the highly notorious "Master Race" which was never written nor part of popular propaganda. But "untermensch" was not a racial categorization, it was basically a designation for communist sympathizers and an inversion of "ubermensch."
In this comment I included difficult-to-find translations of that propaganda. The concept of "untermensch" is no different than what people today might call something like "bio-Leninism" and was not a racial categorization.
Interesting. Digging I only find stuff like:
Right, "volk" is not the German word for "race". There are sparse references to "Herrenvolk" although it was very uncommon, and no references to "master race."
Volk is often used as a metonym for Rasse, though, or just used interchangeably due to semantic sloppiness. I wouldn't read too much into it.
The notoriety of the "Master Race" is supposed to be the most extreme invocation of scientific racism. That is not to say that the Germans did not believe in scientific racism (they obviously did), but the few cases of the use of "Herrenvolk", which was not common in popular propaganda and would not have been in the minds of the general public, is more in the context of this statement here of "raising the German people up" to reach their potential. The Nazis and Hitler in particular viewed the concept of "German" as multi-ethnic in itself. Rosenberg in particular did not go along with the interpretation of "Master Race" manufactured by the Allies at Nuremberg:
This is also seen in the fact that "untermensch" is translated as "subhuman", which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman. So that concept of "untermensch" is misrepresented, mostly through manipulative translation, to make the concept about racial supremacism when it was about a deeper political and ideological struggle.
I do actually take the point that "subhuman" is an imperfect translation, but I think a part of the story you're missing is that the received translation for Übermensch itself in the first half of the 20th century was "Superman", not "Overman". That only changed when the guy with the red cape became so famous as to make the term hard to take seriously in a grown-up context - thank heaven no serious philosopher had invested pivotal significance in the Spinnemensch or the Fledermausmensch. The upshot of which is that at the time the "subhuman" translation emerged, it would not have been intuitive to coin "Undermen" to translate it, because there was no "Overman" to base it on. Instead, you would look at "Superman", which used the Latin prefix "super", and find its antonym, which happens to be "sub". But "Subman" sounds absurd, like a comic book character who can turn into a submarine, and anyway "human" is in fact a more precise translation of the gender-neutral Mensch than "man" is.
End result, "subhuman", a questionable translation but not I think a deliberately manipulative one when it was coined.
It's certainly a bit of esoteric history, but the term "under man" was actually introduced by American author Lothrop Stoddard in his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. The term was adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). The leading racial propagandist Rosenberg (earlier I posted his testimony disputing the "Master Race" translation of his work and the translation/denotation of "Ausrottung"), wrote in 1930 that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” "…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete." Quoting Stoddard: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives."
The term was applied also to figures like Churchill and Roosevelt and even Germans who were Communist sympathizers.
I would say the translation is deliberately manipulative foremost because it has advanced the fiction that the Germans considered Slavs "sub-human", with the propaganda pamphlet Der Untermensch being the chief piece of German propaganda used to establish that claim. But Der Untermensch doesn't mention "slavs" a single time, "Untermensch" is used to describe, culturally and ideologically, Bolshevism and the threat it imposed on "Aryan Europe." The Russians are portrayed as victims, and the cultural connotation of the term used that way is very clear, here for example the art on the left is labeled Zwei Untermenschen and on the right Zwei Menschen. The term was used by the Nazis to characterize cultural and political struggle against what they viewed as counter-civilizational cultural and political movements.
Stoddard's interpretation of the "Under-man" and it's use in Nazi propaganda is very similar to the Rationalist musings of what they call "bio-leninism." But it was not a racial categorization and the slavs were not called "subhuman".
The translation and interpretation of the term in popular understanding as a racial classification is deliberatively manipulative meant to discredit Nazi thinking. "Slavs are subhuman? How could anybody possibly believe that?" is a lot easier for mass audiences to grapple with than engaging the propaganda as it was actually written and what it was actually saying.
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