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"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.
You seem to have spent a lot of words on justifying the fact that Untermensch as originally employed by the Nazis did not have a racial connotation - which I already agreed with - and then simply swerved into reasserting the claim I originally questioned, ie that the misleading translation subhuman was "deliberately manipulative" (or "deliberatively" manipulative, as you had erroneously written) as if you had refuted my counter in any way.
I will admit it is interesting to learn that the term was originally coined in English as "Under-Man" before it was translated into Untermensch and backtranslated into "subhuman"; but this is, as you say, esoteric. I find it pretty likely that whoever coined "subhuman" as a translation was simply unaware of Stoddard's writings. My assumption is that they coined "subhuman" based on "superman", with no deliberate intent of introducing a racial connotation at the time, and that this neutrally-intended English translation went on to be misunderstood.
Besides, I suspect we now associate "subhuman" with racial bigotry at all because of the widespread belief that the Nazis used Untermensch as a term of racial abuse. I'm not entirely convinced that "subhuman" is innately more scientific-racism-coded than "under-man". Had "under-man" remained the accepted English translation from the start, we might simply find ourselves in a place where most people mistakenly assume the Under-man is an inherently racism-based concept. That is, after all, what happened with "the Superman", spandex-clad Kryptonians aside.
I have explained how the mistranslation is used to propagate false information- namely that the enmity of the Nazis towards the Soviet Union was derived from their race science and belief that the Slavs were subhuman. But the enmity was driven by Nazi hostility towards Bolshevism, and "Untermensch" understood in its correct context provides strong evidence for that fact. Instead the mistranslation is absolutely iconic in falsely propagating German motives with respect to their posture towards Russia and "Subhuman Slavs".
This is used in conjunction with the mistranslation and overemphasis of "Master Race" which was not a term that was written or would have been familiar among the public. Rosenberg himself accused the prosecutors at Nuremberg of mistranslating his work and mincing translations for misleading purposes. So at least the chief creator of this propaganda claimed the translations were misleading, and the motives for that are clear in this setting.
I think you are underestimating how carefully that i.e. prosecutors at Nuremberg would be very careful to pick how they translated text in order to bolster their case (i.e. deceptively). The mistranslation of "untermensch" is not obviously deceptive in itself, but because of how that translation is used to propagate other widely believed but false lies.
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