I've been doing some reading into the "Nordic/Aryan Race" topic because I think it's such an odd yet interesting way of thinking, and then using propaganda to promote and inspire in war.
One of my TAs informed me that Hitler meant Aryan as in an ethnic German from Germany, and not the rest of Europe. I've also been by one professor that Hitler wanted the French and English to fight with him against the Soviets.
I want to know what the straight and true information is on this subject... Did the Nazis specifically believe Germany to be the only point of racial purity in Europe? What about the Scandinavians, the English and Irish, the French, or the Spanish?
I've seen photos of Norwegian and Danish, French and Spanish soldiers wearing the Wermacht/Nazi uniform... so apparently they were of some high racial standard to uphold Nazi ideology, right?
We musn't forget Bose and India in this discussion too, with the Free Indian Legion, and that they were deemed racially acceptable to the Nazis.
Specifically, I want to know the answer to what the Nazis determined "racially pure", because it seems like there is always a ton of contradictory evidence towards what the answer really is.
With the sole exception of their virulent antisemitism, all the other Nazi racial theories were a muddle, often contradictory and ultimately just an excuse for whatever policies they wished to implement. To try to make sense of them, or to construct a consistent or coherent overview is ultimately a futile pursuit. As Diemut Mayer so aptly puts it in the awkwardly titled "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939-1945:
Even the Nazis themselves were probably aware from the outset that there was nothing to this racial theory but fabrications and insubstantial phrases. Hitler himself rather early ceased to believe in his own racial ideas, using them merely as a political means, as a way to obfuscate his plans for foreign domination.
The "scientific basis" of their policy was that the Nordic or Aryan race, exemplified in its purest form by the German people, was by nature the strongest race, and therefore destined to rule all others. According to the requirements of the time various peoples were declared to be "related by blood" (artverwandt) and deployed in various Waffen-SS "legions", divisions and brigades. As the war progressed race ceased to matter at all in the recruitment of foreign volunteers, even so-called inferior Slavic divisions were incorporated.