AQA 7042 · 2O · R23 - Policies towards the Jews and the ‘untermenschen’ during wartime
You will trace how Nazi racial persecution became an interconnected programme of forced labour, deportation and mass murder during war, culminating in the genocide of Europe's Jews. You will examine what Wannsee did and did not decide, then use its surviving protocol to assess source value. The specification's word ‘untermenschen’ is dehumanising Nazi terminology.
Perpetrator language and racial war
Nazi policy began with a false racial hierarchy. It imagined ‘Aryan’ Germans as a superior race and classified other human beings as threats, labour reserves or obstacles to German expansion. These claims had no scientific basis. They were political ideas that made exclusion and violence appear necessary to perpetrators and helped turn the Second World War, especially in eastern Europe, into a racial war as well as a military conflict.
‘Untermensch’
A German word meaning approximately ‘subhuman’. The Nazis used it to deny full humanity to people they racialised as enemies, especially Slavic peoples and Jews. It is dehumanising perpetrator language, not a neutral historical category, and should be quoted and explained rather than adopted.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. The ‘Final Solution’ was the Nazis' euphemistic name for the systematic mass-murder phase from 1941 to 1945, not a neutral phrase and not a synonym for every stage of persecution since 1933.
The plural ‘untermenschen’ can hide important differences. Nazi propaganda placed Jews at the centre of an imagined worldwide racial conspiracy and, during 1941, anti-Jewish policy developed towards the murder of every Jew the regime could reach. Poles and Soviet peoples were targeted for German territorial expansion through the destruction of elites, displacement, deliberate starvation, forced labour and mass killing. Roma and Sinti were subjected to racial persecution and genocide. Disabled people were murdered through the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, itself a Nazi euphemism.
These crimes shared racism, dehumanisation and the expanding power of the Nazi state, but they did not form one identical policy. Accurate history names each victim group, asks what perpetrators intended, and traces the institutions and methods used. It does not rank suffering or let a Nazi label erase different experiences.
War and the radicalisation of persecution
War did not make genocide inevitable, but conquest radically changed what the Nazi regime could do. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 placed millions of Jews and non-Jewish Poles under German occupation. German authorities concentrated and exploited Jewish communities, expelled Poles from annexed territory, attacked Polish elites and conscripted civilians for forced labour. These policies joined racial ambition to occupation power.
The invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was a further turning point. Hitler and Nazi leaders presented the campaign as a war against both supposedly inferior Slavic peoples and ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. Behind the army, Einsatzgruppen—mobile task forces of the Security Police and SD—as well as other SS and police units, Order Police, military formations and local auxiliaries carried out mass shootings. By August 1941, the killing had expanded from many adult Jewish men to whole Jewish communities. At Babyn Yar near Kyiv, perpetrator reports recorded the murder of 33,771 Jews on 29–30 September 1941.
The sequence matters. Mass murder was already underway before senior officials assembled at Wannsee. The Chełmno killing centre began murdering Jews with gas vans in December 1941. This does not mean there was one neat day on which every part of the ‘Final Solution’ was fixed: policy radicalised cumulatively through Hitler's ideological direction, decisions by SS leaders including Himmler and Heydrich, and initiatives by officials in occupied territories. War supplied territory, victims and institutions of coercion; racial antisemitism gave the process its genocidal goal.
Distinct policies within a shared system
The wartime racial order linked plans for German settlement, exploitation of labour and removal of supposed enemies. Yet policy varied according to the group, place, date and changing demands of war.
| People targeted | Wartime policy and evidence | Historical distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Jews across Europe | Mass shootings, confinement, forced labour, deportation and murder at killing centres formed the ‘Final Solution’. Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators murdered six million Jewish people. | The aim developed into total, Europe-wide genocide: being classified as Jewish under Nazi racial rules made a person a target. |
| Non-Jewish Poles | Occupation authorities murdered members of the political, religious and intellectual elites, confiscated land, displaced communities, kidnapped selected children for Germanisation and deported civilians for forced labour. | The aim combined territorial colonisation, destruction of leadership, racial domination and exploitation; it was murderous but not identical to the plan to murder every European Jew. |
| Soviet civilians and prisoners of war | German authorities used shootings, systematic starvation, denial of shelter and medicine, deportation and forced labour. About 3.3 million of roughly 5.7 million Soviet POWs in German hands died. | The contrast with the far lower mortality of western Allied POWs shows deliberate racial and ideological policy, not an unavoidable shortage affecting every prisoner equally. |
| Roma and Sinti | Nazi Germany and partner regimes used internment, deportation, forced labour, mass shootings and killing centres in a genocide whose exact death toll remains uncertain. | Historians estimate at least 250,000 European Roma were killed, possibly as many as 500,000; the uncertainty must be preserved rather than turned into a false exact figure. |
Implementation extended beyond a single order or organisation. Hitler set ideological direction and authorised escalation; Himmler, Heydrich and the SS-police apparatus organised central programmes; the Wehrmacht enabled and sometimes participated in racial violence; ministries, railways and occupation administrations registered, dispossessed and transported victims; private firms exploited forced labour; allied regimes and local collaborators assisted in different places. Responsibility was distributed, but it was not accidental: institutions made choices that converted racist goals into policy.
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