Völkisch movement in the context of "Nazism and race"

Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/ NA(H)T-see-iz-əm), formally named National Socialism (NS; German: Nationalsozialismus, German: [natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs] ), is the far-right totalitarian ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was frequently called Hitler Fascism and Hitlerism. The term "neo-Nazism" is applied to far-right groups formed after World War II with similar ideology.

Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, anti-Chinese sentiment, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and eugenics. The Nazis' ultranationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement, which had been prominent within German ultranationalism since the late 19th century. Nazism was influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which the party's "cult of violence" came. It subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy, identifying ethnic Germans as part of what the Nazis regarded as a Nordic Aryan master race. Nazism sought to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity. The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, gain lands for expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum, and exclude those deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races (Untermenschen).

Ariosophy and Armanism are esoteric ideological systems that were largely developed by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, respectively, in Austria between 1890 and 1930. The term 'Ariosophy', which translates to wisdom of the Aryans, was invented by Lanz von Liebenfels in 1915, and during the 1920s, it became the name of his doctrine. For research on the topic, such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult Roots of Nazism, the term 'Ariosophy' is generically used to describe the Aryan/esoteric theories which constituted a subset of the 'Völkische Bewegung'. This broader use of the word is retrospective and it was not generally current among the esotericists themselves. List actually called his doctrine 'Armanism', while Lanz used the terms 'Theozoology' and 'Ario-Christianity' before the First World War.

The ideas of Von List and Lanz von Liebenfels were part of a general occult revival that occurred in Austria and Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries; a revival that was loosely inspired by historical Germanic paganism, holistic philosophy, and Christianity, as well as by esoteric concepts that were influenced by German romanticism and Theosophy. The connection between this form of Germanic mysticism and historical Germanic culture is evident in the mystics' fascination with runes, in the form of Guido von List's Armanen runes.

Völkisch nationalism (German: Völkischer Nationalismus [ˈfœlkɪʃɐ natsi̯onaˈlɪsmʊs], lit. 'Folkist nationalism') is a German far-right ultranationalist, ethno-nationalist and racial nationalist ideology. It assumes the essentialist design as Völker (lit. "peoples") or Volksgruppen (lit. "ethnic groups"), which are described as closed ethnic-biological and ethnic-cultural units within a hierarchy of such populations. Völkisch nationalism influenced Japanese minzoku nationalism.

At times, Völkisch nationalism was a broad and predominant ideological view in Central Europe, represented in numerous nationalist, typically explicitly antisemitic and other racist associations of all kinds with many publications and well-known personalities. It differentiates itself from the Völkisch movement by being a more vague and not inherently antisemitic ideology. Today, particularly in Germany, ethnopluralism is viewed as standing in the same tradition as Völkisch nationalism.

The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its racist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of the Nordic race being the best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, black people, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, with the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, and Greeks to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as the Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and Indo-Aryans were considered inferior.

These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of historical race concepts, 19th-century and early 20th century anthropology, 19th-century and early 20th-century biology, racial biology, white supremacism, notions of Aryan racial superiority, Nordicism, social Darwinism, German nationalism, and antisemitism with the selection of the most extreme parts. They also originated from German military alliance needs. The term Aryan generally originated during the discourses about the use of the term Volk (the people constitute a lineage group whose members share a territory, a language, and a culture). Unlike the German armed forces (Wehrmacht) only used for military conflicts, the Schutzstaffel (SS) was a paramilitary organization directly controlled by the Nazis with absolute compliance with Nazi racial ideology and policies.

Racial nationalism is an ideology that advocates a racial definition of national identity. Racial nationalism seeks to preserve "racial purity" of a nation through policies such as banning race mixing and the immigration of other races. To create a justification for such policies, racial nationalism often promotes eugenics, and advocates political and legislative solutions based on eugenic and other racial theories.

Nationalism in Northeast Asia (China, Korea and Japan) is partly related to 'racial nationalism' (民族主義), it was influenced by the German ethnonationalist tradition (Völkisch movement and Blood and soil) of the 19th century, which was imported from Japan during the Meiji period. This kind of nationalism is related to the term 民族 similar to the German word Volk.

In Nazi German terminology, Volksdeutsche (German pronunciation: [ˈfɔlksˌdɔʏtʃə] ) were "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship." The term is the nominalised plural of volksdeutsch, with Volksdeutsche denoting a singular female, and Volksdeutscher, a singular male. The words Volk and völkisch conveyed the meanings of "folk".

Ethnic Germans living outside Germany shed their identity as Auslandsdeutsche (Germans abroad), and morphed into the Volksdeutsche in a process of self-radicalisation. This process gave the Nazi regime the nucleus around which the new Volksgemeinschaft was established across the German borders.