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.
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.” 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. However, the concept has not disappeared