Hello, I'm not very active on Reddit but I wanted to ask about this-
I was reading the introduction to This Way For The Gas Ladies And Gentlemen by Polish author Tadeusz Borowski and was surprised by this line: "They were both "lucky". Three weeks earlier "Aryans" had stopped being sent to the gas chambers- except for special cases. From then on only Jews were gassed en masse."
This confused me because I had always been taught that the Nazis thought German/Nordic people were the Aryan "master race" and that Jewish people and Roma and Sinti were at the very bottom of the hierarchy and considered "Untermenschen", and that Slavs were also in this category (although they were not targeted for total extermination the way the first two groups were).
Upon doing some research online I came across conflicting information, with Wikipedia and posts in this subreddit affirming what I'd been taught whereas the USHMM Holocaust Encylcopedia says (in the entry for "Aryan") "Although Poles, Russians, and some other Slavs suffered brutal persecution under Nazi rule, they were considered to be "Aryans." Race scientists and anthropologists too considered Slavs to be composed of the same races, including Nordic, as Germans. They were deemed to be of related blood.". However, in another entry it says the opposite: "But, Hitler warned, the German “Aryan” race was threatened by dissolution from within and without. The internal threat lurked in intermarriages between “Aryan” Germans and members of inherently inferior races: Jews, Roma, Africans, and Slavs." (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/victims-of-the-nazi-era-nazi-racial-ideology?parent=en%2F6590#the-aryan-race-4)
Can anyone here shed some light on this issue and the contradictory information and definitions that seem to be out there? Thank you!
Update: I've just noticed a paragraph further up in the USHMM entry and it clarifies things slightly: "The word Aryan proved difficult to define precisely in racial terms. Nazi race scientists disapproved of its use because it was based on linguistic similarities, not hereditary physical or intellectual characteristics. Nazi officials stopped using the terms Aryan and non-Aryan in legislation after the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed. Instead, they substituted the phrase, “those of German or related blood.” Officially, individuals of “related blood” were people of European descent. Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick stated that national minorities in Germany, such as Poles and Danes, were of related blood and thus eligible to be citizens. According to Nazi racial terminology, Jews, Black people, and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) were considered to be “non-European.” They were thus prohibited from becoming German citizens. In addition, they were forbidden to have sexual relations with or marry "those of German or related blood.”"
I'm still quite surprised to learn this because like I say I was always under the impression that the Nazis considered Slavs subhuman and "non-Aryan".