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Was the World War II a race war?

1. INTRODUCTION
World War II was the first armed confrontation to take place in almost every part of the world
simultaneously. Whilst the name suggests otherwise, World War I was mainly a European war,
fought -mostly- on European soil. The USA did not enter the war until 1917 and while their role
was instrumental in balancing the scales after the Bolshevik party pulled Russia out of the war,
there were no global scale operations to speak of (Hobsbawm, 1995). World War II war theatres
however, were spread from Normandy to the Pacific ocean and from Poland to El Alamein; it was
the beginning of the countdown for the -slow- collapse of the old European colonial superpowers
and marked the start of a violent decolonisation process, with the most notable example being the
Vietnam war (Anderson, 2005). Therefore, racial matters were a very important aspect, not only of
the war politics, but also, of the politics of war (especially in the Third Reich).

In this short essay I will try to go through some of the racial implications of the World War II had by
analysing the historical sources relevant to the two major powers of the war, Germany and the USA.
In that way, I will try to carefully examine the ways in which racism was institutionalised and
expressed in those two countries in the war context and finally, I will attempt to compare and
contrast the two paradigms in an effort to reach to a conclusion based on my findings.

2. THE THIRD REICH AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION


One of the first steps of the Nazi party after it came to power in 1933, was the implementation of its
pseudoscientific racist doctrine that basically claimed the superiority of the Aryan race. According
to the Nazis, Jewish, Slavic, Romani and African people belonged to a group called Untermenschen

(sub-humans), which was deemed unworthy of life and therefore had to be exterminated (Cecil,
1972).

We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and
biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here (Shirer, 1960).

These words of Erich Koch, commander of Ukraine, are a perfect summary of the whole philosophy
behind the Nazi propaganda and theory of hate towards non-Germanic people: non-Aryan people
were not just simply considered as sub-humans; they were not to be spared. Their fate was to be
enslaved by the Germanic race that was sufficiently pure-blooded(Timm, 2010). It would be safe
to say that even though there was a large number of Slavic and Roma people that were brutally
persecuted during the years the Nazi party stayed in power, the most multitudinous population of
non-Aryans residing in Germany, the Jewish people, faced a much worse persecution.

The Jewish pogrom did not start as a downright extermination in Germany. The initial course of
action was aiming towards their mere displacement: the Haavara Agreement that was signed in
1933, allowed the free emigration of German Jews to Palestine, which led to the outflux of some
60.000 people (Weiss). After 1939 however, the situation changed dramatically: the Nazi
propaganda started blaming the Jewish populations for every social issue, such as poverty,
hyperinflation and unemployment or by simply accusing them of being communists and coconspirators of the Bolsheviks.The culmination of the Nazi policy was revealed to its fullest extent
in 1942, at the Wannsee Conference when the Final Solution was first introduced as a state policy.
This plan involved the complete and final extermination of all people that had Jewish heritage.
(Koonz, 2003).

Racial politics was the cornerstone of the Nazi party ideology and its leader, Adolf Hitler. Even
before his ascent to power, Hitler was blaming that the moral degradation of the Weimar Republic
was the fault of racial defilement (2003). The philosophy of Nazism, although allied to, was
distinctly different from the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy: while the central theme of
fascism is the supremacy of the state, Nazism was concentrated mainly on themes of race. Under
Nazism the state serves as a weapon for the eradication of sub-humans and the advancement of
the master race (Miller, 1988).

3. USA AND AFRICAN AMERICAN CONSCRIPTS

Racial tension between white and african americans was by no means as cruel in the USA, but it
was still very prevalent nonetheless. Black americans were considered lower-class citizens, often
unprotected by the state and discriminatory practices were present in all aspects of everyday life.
Even though slavery was abolished in the USA since 1866, Jim Crow laws were still in power after
the end of WWI.1

By enlisting in the war effort in the previous world war, african americans hoped that they will
prove their patriotism and therefore earn better living conditions, without fearing for their lives
(Barbeau et al., 1974). They returned to find their expectations utterly betrayed: black people were
still victims of racial discrimination and kept in poverty. It was therefore not a surprise that African

1 Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws
institutionalised the discriminatory inequalities in terms of work conditions, payment, loaning etc, that were still
practiced in many parts of the USA. The term itself is derived by popular culture: it has been attributed to "Jump Jim
Crow", a show performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice, who sang and dance in blackface (WOODWARD, C. V. The
strange career of Jim Crow.)

Americans were indifferent after the outbreak of the WWII. For them, it was just a white man war
in which they had no interest in participating in (Jordan, 1974).

Although the black press was very skeptical towards the war, more than a million black people
enlisted in the armed forces during WWII.2 The financial stability that the military offered, as well
as the growing threat of the Nazis surely played a role in this massive induction. Despite that fact,
the spirit of discrimination was prevalent even within the ranks of the military: Nazi prisoners of
war enjoyed more rights than black American servicemen (Mosley, 1992). Among many other
things, it was the experiences of those people that eventually fuelled the great civil right movements
in the 60s.

4. CONCLUSION
It was an extremely challenging task to develop such a broad topic with such a strict word count
limitation, but I believed that I have made a valid and well-grounded argument as to why and how
WWII was a race war. Without even scratching the surface, we still pinpointed that racism and
politics of hate, was not something that was only present in Nazi Germany (although it was there it
met its ultimate materialisation). The WWII was a race war, but not a war between races. It
signalled the start of a new era that will take the 60s by storm and brought upon a wave of new
ideas that struggled to eradicate the western civilisations shameful past.

2 Our war is not against Hitler in Europe but against the Hitlers in America JORDAN, W. D. 1974. The white man's
burden : historical origins of racism in the United States, New York, Oxford U.P.

Bibliography

ANDERSON, D. L. 2005. The Vietnam War, Basingstoke ; New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
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troops in World War I, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
CECIL, R. 1972. The myth of the master race : Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi ideology, London,
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JORDAN, W. D. 1974. The white man's burden : historical origins of racism in the United States,
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KOONZ, C. 2003. The Nazi conscience, Cambridge, Mass. u.a., Belknap Press of Harvard Univ.
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MILLER, S. T. 1988. Mastering modern European history, Basingstoke, Macmillan Education.
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Secker & Warburg.
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the Holocaust [Online]. Yad Vashem - SHOAH Resource Center. Available:
http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf [Accessed 15.03
2016].
WOODWARD, C. V. The strange career of Jim Crow.

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