How did Hitler make allies of races he hated?

by svodanovich

Or, conversely, how did people form alliances with Hitler and the Nazis while they were exterminating their race?

depanneur

Here's an excerpt from a post on a similar subject that I wrote not too long ago:

the Nazi conception of race was very different from modern, especially North American standards. Nazi racism was paradoxical because it was based in racial pseudo-science as much as it was based in spiritual mysticism; they (and many other Germans) believed that races had inherent moral traits. Those descended from the Aryans had the most noble and desirable traits, while the Jews were considered to be fundamentally morally flawed because of their race.

It didn't matter to the Nazis if a Jew had blonde hair, blue eyes and stereotypical 'Aryan' facial features and a Hitler-mustache - just being a Jew or having Jewish blood automatically made them a threat to the Volksgemeinschaft ('people's community', a propaganda term for Nazi totalitarian-racial society). To the Nazis, race came with inherent moral and psychological traits that were impossible to fully overcome - a German would always be inherently noble, courageous and devoted, while a Jew would always be inherently cowardly (but somehow always conspiring to destroy the German race) and evil. Those with Aryan blood were culture-creators, while Jews were culture destroyers (nevermind all those Nobel Prizes).

It should also be clear that the Nazis' did not have a monolithic racial doctrine. Some were more into the pseudo-science aspect, while others like Alfred Rosenberg and Himmler were exponents of a more spiritualistic and mystical racism. Rosenberg was considered the architect of Nazism's general racial doctrine, and wrote about how the Aryans were an advanced race from Atlantis who were responsible for all of humanity's achievements in China, India, Greece and Rome until they mixed their blood with the natives and degenerated. Nazism was weirdly multi-national in its racial ideology - Frenchmen, Italians, Russians and even the Chinese had a small percentage of the population with Aryan blood, which is why they were totally OK with creating multi-national SS divisions. He believed that Germans still had more Aryan blood (note that Germans and Aryans were not the same thing; they believed there were Germans without Aryan blood, and that other nationalities had it. Germans simply had a higher percentage of 'Aryan-ness' than everyone else) and that they had to guard their precious blood from contamination with inherently evil Jewish blood. This kind of racial worldview had a very strong spiritual dimension that even other Nazis were wary of.

[deleted]

Can you be specific? I can't think of any race which cut an alliance with Hitler while he was exterminating their race. The two most immediate examples- Roma and Jews- simply didn't have a position to cut such deals- they had no autonomous state.

Were you referring more to the Czechs or Polish or Ukraine? Because typically either they didn't really have the opportunity to establish an autonomous government, or they weren't being targeted as a race.