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Furthermore, the Untermensch classification dictated labor policy. Concentration camp inmates designated as Untermenschen received the lowest food rations (often below 1,000 calories/day) and were subjected to “extermination through labor” ( Vernichtung durch Arbeit ). The SS even developed a sliding scale of humanity: at the top, German citizens; below them, Western European “Germanic” peoples; then “inferior races” like Romani; and at the very bottom, the Untermensch —Jews and Slavs marked for immediate or near-immediate death. The Nazi state deployed Untermensch across all media. In print, Der Stürmer regularly featured cartoons of Jews with ape-like features, overlaid with captions like “The Subhuman’s Dream: The German Maiden.” In radio and film, newsreels described the Eastern Front as a battle between Kulturmenschen (cultural humans) and Untermenschen . The 1943 film Die Frontschau (Front Show) showed dead Soviet soldiers with voiceover commentary: “These are not human corpses. These are the remains of subhumans.”

Understanding Untermensch is essential not only for historical scholarship but for contemporary ethics. The mechanisms of linguistic dehumanization—labeling a group as vermin, disease, or subhuman—remain a precursor to atrocity. The Nazi Untermensch is the archetype of this process. 2.1. Pre-Nazi Usage The word Untermensch predates the Third Reich. It appeared sporadically in 19th-century German literature, often in a purely descriptive sense (e.g., a person of low social standing). However, its first significant ideological use came from the American white supremacist and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, whose 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization used the term under-man to describe what he saw as the biological inferiority of non-white races. The German translation, Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925), introduced the term to German audiences. 2.2. Distortion of Nietzsche Crucially, the Nazis appropriated Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (Overman) from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). For Nietzsche, the Übermensch was a creative, self-overcoming individual who transcended petty morality—not a racial type. The Nazis inverted this into a racial hierarchy, positing the Aryan as the Übermensch and all others—especially Jews and Slavs—as the biological opposite: the Untermensch . Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a fervent nationalist and anti-Semite, abetted this distortion after her brother’s mental collapse. 3. The Nazi Conceptualization of Untermensch 3.1. Biological vs. Cultural Definition For Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg (author of The Myth of the 20th Century ) and Heinrich Himmler, the Untermensch was not a human being who behaved badly. It was a different biological category altogether. In a 1942 SS training pamphlet titled Der Untermensch , published by the SS Main Office, the subhuman is described as: “A biological being, equipped with hands, feet, and a kind of brain, but utterly dissimilar inside. A creature from whose face terror speaks, whose eyes betray a murderous instinct, whose fingers are claws. It is a human-animal mixture.” This pamphlet, illustrated with crude drawings of “Asiatic” and “Jewish” features, circulated over 3.8 million copies. It argued that Untermenschen live in “hordes,” lack any concept of honor, and are driven only by primal urges—lust, greed, and destructive envy. 3.2. The Slavic Untermensch While Jews were the primary target of extermination, the term Untermensch was most systematically applied to Slavic peoples—Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East), a secret Nazi plan for Eastern European colonization, classified over 30 million Slavs as Untermenschen to be displaced, starved, or worked to death. Himmler famously told SS leaders in 1943: “Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the ditch is completed for Germany. They are a subhuman people ( Untermenschenvolk ).” This racialization allowed the Wehrmacht to treat Soviet POWs with unprecedented brutality: of 5.7 million captured, 3.3 million died in captivity—a mortality rate of 58%, almost entirely justified by the Untermensch doctrine. 3.3. The Jewish Untermensch For Jews, the label Untermensch carried an additional layer: conspiracy. Nazi ideology held that Jews were not only subhuman but also the intellectual architects of subhumanity—through Bolshevism, capitalism, and modernist art. The 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) explicitly conflates Jewish people with rats, stating: “Just as rats are lower forms of life, so too are the Jews a subhuman race.” This combination—vermin + conspiratorial intelligence—made the Jewish Untermensch uniquely dangerous and uniquely deserving of total annihilation. 4. Legal and Institutional Codification The Untermensch concept was not mere rhetoric; it had legal force. Under the Nuremberg Laws (1935), Jews were stripped of citizenship, but the Untermensch doctrine went further: it declared that certain groups had no claim to humane treatment under any law. In occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, SS courts refused to prosecute German soldiers for killing Untermenschen unless the killing harmed military discipline. Himmler’s 1941 “Commissar Order” explicitly ordered the execution of Soviet political commissars as “bearers of the subhuman Bolshevik ideology.” untermench

Abstract The term Untermensch (German for “under-man” or “subhuman”) represents one of the most potent and destructive political concepts of the 20th century. Coined as a biological and racial antithesis to the Übermensch (Overman) of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, the Nazi iteration of Untermensch served as a pseudo-scientific justification for genocide, enslavement, and territorial expansion. This paper traces the etymological and ideological evolution of the term, its central role in Nazi propaganda (particularly toward Slavic peoples and Jews), its codification in SS legal doctrine, and its post-1945 afterlife in far-right rhetoric. By analyzing primary sources including Heinrich Himmler’s speeches, the SS-Leitheft (SS training pamphlets), and wartime propaganda films, this paper argues that Untermensch was not merely an insult but a legal and metaphysical category designed to exclude entire populations from the moral community of Menschen (humans). 1. Introduction In September 1941, the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued a directive to SS officers regarding the treatment of captured Soviet political commissars and Jews. He reminded them that the enemy belonged to a category of being so fundamentally different from Germans that normal rules of war—indeed, normal rules of human interaction—did not apply. That category was the Untermensch . Within the machinery of Nazi ideology, this single noun enabled a moral revolution: it transformed genocide into hygiene, slavery into order, and mass murder into a defensive measure against biological contamination. The Nazi state deployed Untermensch across all media

Beyond death, the Untermensch concept justified medical atrocities—experiments without anesthesia, forced sterilization, and the harvesting of “subhuman” tissue for German medical training. The skeletons of murdered concentration camp inmates were sent to German universities as “specimens of the subhuman form.” After 1945, the term Untermensch became a legal and moral taboo in Germany. The use of Nazi racial terminology is a criminal offense under German law ( Volksverhetzung , incitement to hatred). However, the concept has not disappeared. Far-right groups across Europe and North America have revived Untermensch or its translations (“subhuman,” “untermensch”) to describe immigrants, refugees, and racial minorities. During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Serbian nationalists referred to Bosnian Muslims as podljud (subhumans). In the 2010s and 2020s, neo-Nazi forums and white supremacist manifestos (e.g., the Christchurch shooter’s “Great Replacement” text) explicitly invoke Untermensch as a template for dehumanization. These are the remains of subhumans

Linguistic dehumanization remains a predictor of genocidal violence. The Rwandan Hutu propaganda radio station RTLM called Tutsis inyenzi (cockroaches)—the same semantic move as Untermensch . Scholars of genocide now treat the term as a warning sign. The concept of Untermensch was not a spontaneous Nazi invention but a deliberate, pseudo-scientific category designed to manufacture moral permission for industrial murder. By stripping Jews, Slavs, and others of their humanity, the Nazi regime dissolved the ethical constraints that protect civilians in war. The word itself—cold, clinical, and categorical—remains a monument to what happens when ideology overrides empathy.

Education was key. Hitler Youth manuals included chapters on “Racial Hygiene” that taught children to identify Untermenschen by skull shape, nose form, and behavior. One school exercise asked: “Why must the German people fear the Untermensch ? Answer: Because he breeds faster, lives like an animal, and will drown our culture in his filth.” The term Untermensch directly enabled the Holocaust and the Porajmos (Romani genocide). It erased the last moral barrier: if your enemy is not human, killing is not murder—it is pest control. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) officers testified at Nuremberg that they had internalized this classification. One SS man, Otto Ohlendorf, stated: “We were taught that the Jews and Slavs were Untermenschen … I felt nothing. You do not feel pity for a rat.”