I'm asking because the bases for western society is said to come from places like Greece, and Rome etc, even looking at the Third Reich, many things, from their symbols and architecture has obvious creco-roman inspiration. But the Mediterranean people weren't Nordic, and based on history it seems that the southern Mediterraneans could have challenged their Nordic supremacy ideology, Western civilization had it's foundations in Greece, and Greece was the light of Europe during antiquity, The Roman empire was the dominate empire for thousands of years, and when it split you had the eastern roman empire(byzantine) which was the light of European civilization during the "Dark ages" You had the enlightenment of the Italian renaissance with Greek byzantine scholars that rekindled the so called "European spirit" Many of the Great European artists, poets, philosophers come from Italy and Greece, Leonardo da vinci, Aristotle, Plato, the creators of Cyrillic script by the Greek brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, Architects such as Isidore of Miletus, Homer, Marco polo, Micheal Angelo. Arguably the most important, thinkers, philosophers, artists, architects of the western world come/have come exclusively from Southern Europe, not even mentioning the vast amounts of Spanish, Portuguese explorers etc.
So did the Nazi's see this as threatening to there racial myths? did they try to explain these things away with pseudo history and science, perhaps they tried to have their people believe all those civilizations were in fact Germanic etc?
Is there any information on this? Thank you, and sorry for my English, not my first language
your English seems great :)
well first, the Nazis used the term "Aryan" which has a far broader meaning than "Nordic"; it was originally just a neutral, non-racist ethno-linguistic term for an Indo-European. The Nazis believed that the Nordic look of blonde hair & blue eyes was the "pure" Aryan look and that all Aryans originally looked like this and that this was no longer the case because of interbreeding with Jews and other inferior races. Greeks and Romans would have been Aryans (and the Nazis probably imagined them as Nordic in appearance), the Nazis weren't concerned with them – they were extremely concerned with Jews, Slavs, and gypsies.
Racial theorists of the 19th century quite some time before the Nazis quite arbitrarily divided Europeans into three racial categories – Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. Everyone seemed to agree that the Alpines were inferior but there was some disagreement about the other two as to who was best. The Nazi ideology obviously inherited the views of the Nordicists. But the Germanic herrenvolk was purported to be such not because it was intellectually superior to other races (the Nazis didn't even hold the Jews to be intellectually inferior – in fact, the Nazi race myth had to portray Jews as extremely cunning, covertly undermining the Aryan race and stabbing them in the back). So the fact that European civilisation, philosophy, art, poetry, architecture, mathematics, history, astronomy, etc. were born or flourished in ancient Greece and along the Mediterranean coast, the fact that when Pericles erected the Parthenon over Athens the Germanic peoples basically lived in the woods – this doesn't actually threaten the Nordic master-race ideology, because the Nazis weren't claiming their Nordic-type race was the smartest, they instead claimed that it had qualities like innate leadership, discipline, strength of will and rather martial qualities like that, ie. a master-race. Think of the leader of your country, he's probably not the smartest person in the entire country, right? But he doesn't need to be to be qualified for leadership. The Nordicists basically said that while Mediterranean types have historically been far more intellectual and creative than Nordics, they lacked these characteristics I have just mentioned, and were morally decadent somehow – nerds, basically. I believe they thought the fall of Rome was due to moral decadence and racial mixing too. In short, the Germanic master-race the Nazis liked to believe in was not a race of effete intellectuals who were good at building culture civilisations, but a race of hardy warriors and intrepid conquerors (think of the Nordic Viking explorers who discovered the Americas).
another thing you've said
did they try to explain these things away with pseudo history and science, perhaps they tried to have their people believe all those civilizations were in fact Germanic etc?
precisely this occurred too. It was commonly believed by Nordicists that the rulers, if not the common people, of the great Mediterranean civilisations – and even pre-Hellenic Egypt – were Nordic types (Alexander the Great was blond, many of the Roman Emperors were too, eg. Commodus). Here is an essay by a Nazi racial theorist who interprets Homer's Iliad as depicting a Bronze-Age war between blonde-haired Greek warriors and dark-skinned Trojans (many of Homer's Achaeans are in fact described as blonde, including Achilles, as are many of the Greek gods).