GERMAN
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
Germans (Deutsche) are defined as an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common German culture, citizenship, speaking the German language as a mother tongue and being born in Germany. Germans are also defined by their national citizenship, which had, in the course of German history, varying relations to the above (German culture), according to the influence of subcultures and society in general.
Out of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 70 million people of German ancestry (mainly in the USA, Brazil, Argentina, France and Canada) who are not native speakers of German but who may still consider themselves ethnic Germans, so that the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 75 and 160 million, depending to the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans or partial German ancestry). In the USA, 15.2% of citizens identify as of German American according to the United States Census of 2000, more than any other group.
Origins
The Germans are a Germanic people which as an ethnicity emerged in southern Scandinavia in the centuries leading up to the Migrations Period, where they were in contact with other peoples, including Finnic inhabitants of Scandinavia to the north, Balto-Slavic peoples to the east and Celts to the south. Later in history, Germanic peoples — as most other European people — mixed with bordering ethnic groups such as Gallo-Romans and Slavs. For the global genetic make-up of the Germans and other peoples, see also the World Haplogroups Maps PDF (386 KiB) and the National Geographic Genographic Atlas.
In the course of the Migration Period, Slavs expanded westwards at the same time as Germans expanded eastwards. The result was German colonization as far East as Romania, and Slavic colonization as far west as present-day Lübeck (at the Baltic Sea), Hamburg (connected to the North Sea), and along the river Elbe and its tributary Saale further South.
Ethnic Germans
Ethnic Germans form an important minority group in several countries in central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Russia) as well as in Namibia, southern Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile.
Some groups may be classified as Ethnic Germans despite no longer having German as their mother tongue or belonging to a distinct German culture. Until the 1990s, two million Ethnic Germans lived throughout the former Soviet Union, especially in Russia and Kazakhstan.
In the United States 1990 census, 57 million people are fully or partly of German ancestry, forming the largest single ethnic group in the country. Most Americans of German descent live in the Mid-Atlantic states (especially Pennsylvania) and the northern Midwest (especially in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Missouri), but historically Germanic immigrant enclaves can be found in many other states (e.g., the German Texans).
Notable Ethnic German populations also exist in other Anglosphere countries such as Canada (approx. 9% of the population) and Australia (approx. 4% of the population).
Subgroups
The Germans are divided into sub-nationalities, some of which form dialectal unities with groups outside Germany that are not considered "Germans". The southern Upper German groups retain a pronounced identity, in the case of the Swabians historically even the cause of a limited movement of Alemannic separatism. The Low German Platt speakers also retain a certain ethnic identity, while the Central German majority has largely abandoned individual nationalisms.
- Upper German
- the Bavarians (ca. 10 million) form the Austro-Bavarian ethno-linguistic group together with the Austrians.
- the Swabians (ca. 10 million) form the Alemannic group together with the Alemannic Swiss, the Alsatians and the Vorarlbergians.
- Central German dialect group (ca. 45 million)
- Central Franconian, forms a dialectal unity with Luxembourgish
- Rhine Franconian (Ripuarian, Kölsch)
- Thuringian
- Hessian
- Upper Saxon
- High Prussian
- German Silesian
- Yiddish dialects
- Low German (ca. 3-10 million), forms a dialectal unity with Dutch Low Saxon
Ethnic Nationalism
The reaction evoked in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars was a strong ethnic nationalism that emphasized, and sometimes overemphasized, the cultural bond between Germans. Later alloyed with the high standing and world-wide influence of German science at the end of the 19th century, and to some degree enhanced by Bismarck's military successes and the following 40 years of almost perpetual economic boom (the Gründerzeit), it gave the Germans an impression of cultural supremacy, particularly compared to the Slavs.
Ethnic nationalism has essentially been a taboo in German society since World War II, but it has seen a limited comeback since German reunification, with the ethnic nationalist National Democratic Party of Germany receiving 1.6% of the popular vote in the 2005 federal election.
Nationalism
Hitler founded The Nazi state upon a racially defined "German people" and principally rejected the idea of being bound by the limits of nationalism. That was only a means for attempting unlimited supremacy. In that sense, its hyper-nationalism was tolerated to reach a world-dominating Germanic-Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. This idea is a central concept of Mein Kampf (English: My Struggle), symbolized by the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one empire, one leader). The Nazi relationship between the Volk and the state was called the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), a late nineteenth or early twentieth century neologism that defined a communal duty of citizens in service to the Reich ("empire", "realm", or "nation"). The term "National Socialism" derives from this citizen-nation relationship, whereby the term socialism is invoked and is meant to be realized through the common duty of the individuals to the German people; all actions are to be in service of the Reich. The Nazis stated that their goal was to bring forth a nation-state as the locus and embodiment of the people's collective will, bound by the Volksgemeinschaft, as both an ideal and an operating instrument. In comparison, traditional socialist ideologies oppose the idea of nations.
Militarism
Nazi rationale invested heavily in the militarist belief that great nations grow from military power and maintained order, which in turn grow "naturally" from "rational, civilized cultures". The Nazi Party appealed to German nationalists and national pride, capitalizing on irredentist and revanchist sentiments as well as aversions to various aspects of modernist thinking (although at the same time embracing other modernist ideas, such as admiration for engine power). Many ethnic Germans felt deeply committed to the goal of creating the Greater Germany (the old dream to include German-speaking Austria), which some believe required the use of military force to achieve
Racism and Discrimination
The Nazi racial philosophy was influenced by the works of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant, and wholly embraced Alfred Rosenberg's Aryan Invasion Theory. The theory traced Aryan peoples in ancient Iran invading the Indus Valley Civilization, and carrying with them great knowledge and science that had been preserved from the antediluvian world. This "antediluvian world" referred to Thule, the speculative pre-Flood/Ice Age origin of the Aryan race, and is often tied to ideas of Atlantis. Several of the founders and subsequent leadership of the Nazi Party had been associates — and very occasionally members — of the Thule-Gesellschaft (the Thule Society), which romanticized the Aryan race through theology and ritual.
Hitler also claimed that a nation was the highest creation of a "race", and "great nations" (literally large nations) were the creation of homogeneous populations of "great races" working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from "races" with "natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits". The "weakest nations", Hitler said, were those of "impure" or "mongrel races", because they had divided, quarreling, and therefore weak cultures. Worst of all were seen to be the parasitic "Untermensch" (Subhumans), mainly Jews, but also Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled and so-called anti-socials, all of whom were considered "lebensunwertes Leben" ("Life-unworthy life") owing to their perceived deficiency and inferiority, as well as their wandering, nationless invasions ("the International Jew"). The persecution of homosexuals as part of the Holocaust (with the pink triangle) has seen increasing scholarly attention since the 1990s, even though many homosexuals served in the Sturmabteilungen.
According to Nazism, it is an obvious mistake to permit or encourage plurality within a nation. Fundamental to the Nazi goal was the unification of all German-speaking peoples, "unjustly" divided into different Nation States. The Nazis tried to recruit Dutch and Scandinavian men into the SS, considering them of superior "Germanic" stock, with only limited success.
Hitler claimed that nations that could not defend their territory did not deserve it. He thought "slave races", like the Slavic peoples, to be less worthy to exist than "leader races". In particular, if a master race should require room to live ("Lebensraum"), he thought such a race should have the right to displace the inferior indigenous races.
"Races without homelands", Hitler proclaimed, were "parasitic races", and the richer the members of a parasitic race were, the more virulent the parasitism was thought to be. A master race could therefore, according to the Nazi doctrine, easily strengthen itself by eliminating parasitic races from its homeland. This idea was the given rationalization for the Nazis' later oppression and elimination of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Poles, the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals and others not belonging to these groups or categories that were part of the Holocaust. The Waffen-SS and other German soldiers (including parts of the Wehrmacht), as well as civilian paramilitary groups in occupied territories, were responsible for the deaths of an estimated eleven million men, women, and children in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, and death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka
Eugenics
The belief in the need to purify the German race led them to eugenics; this effort culminated in the involuntary euthanasia of disabled people and the compulsory sterilization of people with mental deficiencies or illnesses perceived as hereditary. Adolf Hitler considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State," and praised its early eugenics treatment of deformed children.
Antisemitism
According to Nazi propaganda, the Jews thrived on fomenting division amongst Germans and amongst states. Nazi antisemitism was primarily racial: "the Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race;" however, the Jews were also described as plutocrats exploiting the worker: "As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."
Religion
Hitler extended his rationalizations into a religious doctrine, underpinned by his criticism of traditional Catholicism. In particular, and closely related to Positive Christianity, Hitler objected to Catholicism's ungrounded and international character — that is, it did not pertain to an exclusive race and national culture. At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, the Nazis combined elements of Germany's Lutheran community tradition with its northern European, organic pagan past. Elements of militarism found their way into Hitler's own theology; he preached that his was a "true" or "master" religion, because it would "create mastery" and avoid comforting lies. Those who preached love and tolerance, "in contravention to the facts", were said to be "slave" or "false" religions. The man who recognized these "truths", Hitler continued, was said to be a "natural leader", and those who denied it were said to be "natural slaves". "Slaves" — especially intelligent ones, he claimed — were always attempting to hinder their masters by promoting false religious and political doctrines.
Although a few exceptions exist, Christian persecution was primarily limited to those who refused to accommodate the new regime and yield to its power. A particularly poignant exemplar is seen in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, the Nazis often used the church to justify their stance and included many Christian symbols in the Third Reich.
Volkism was inherently hostile toward atheism: freethinkers clashed frequently with Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. On taking power, Hitler banned freethought organizations and launched an “anti-godless” movement. In a 1933 speech he declared: “We have . . . undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” This forthright hostility was far more straightforward than the Nazis’ complex, often contradictory stance toward traditional Christian faith.
