Völkisch equality
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Völkisch equality is a concept within Nazism and a legal practice within Nazi Germany and its controlled territories during World War II, which ascribed racial equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and full legal rights to people of German blood or related blood, but deliberately excluded people outside this definition, who were regarded as inferior.
Nazism rejected the concept of the universal equality of human beings.
The Nazis advocated a
The Nazis sought to dismantle what they deemed to be an unnatural hierarchy of the middle class and nobility who had allegedly jealously kept their wealth and titles while failing to justify their hierarchical position through their actions in World War I. Even nationalists among them were deemed by the Nazis to have not upheld an appropriate share of contribution to the war effort.[3] Thus the Nazis claimed that only the primordial brutality and willpower of the lower orders could save Germany, and thus justified equality of opportunity as a means to create new capable leaders for German society, and to build a new, "natural" hierarchy based on merit.[3]
References
- ^ a b c d e Diemut Majer, Peter Thomas Hill, Edward Vance Humphrey. "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied. Washington, DC, USA: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003.
- ^ Götz Aly, Jefferson Chase. Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. New York, New York, USA: Macmillan, 2008, p. 13.
- ^ a b c d MacGregor Knox. Common destiny: dictatorship, foreign policy, and war in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 208.