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I'm not sure I understand your contention. Pan-Germanicism was about uniting ethnic Germans. Are you implying that there's no ethnic difference between a German and an Ashkenazi Jew or a Romani?


No, I'm saying that the way that the Nazis defined German identity was their biological model of "racial" classification, and not a cultural feature like ethnicity. The Nazis then (as today), have an explicitly biological notion of identity, not cultural.

I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.

Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?

How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".


The point I was making above was that Nazis were concerned about German-ness (well, Aryan-ness) not whiteness. Classifying them as white supremacists is generally incorrect.


The problem with that argument is that the Nazis considered the German "race" to be the paragon of "whiteness", and other less-German white peoples, like European Jews, to be degraded. They absolutely conflated "whiteness" with their idealized German identity.




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