Did the Third Reich Declare Amerindians to be "Aryan"? Nazis & Native Americans

[Lamprecht]

I found something humorous in the following book:

Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II - Jere Bishop Franco
https://archive.is/LzbkC or http://web.archive.org/web/201908140031 ... g/fjMa1OdF

So, the National Socialists thought they could declare Amerindians to be "Aryan" and then an American anthropologist argued against it.

The [American Indian] Federation provided German propaganda agencies with authentic Native Americans, such as Jemison and Towner, who criticized the United State government in cooperation with American pro-Fascist groups. As part of a Fascist intent to conduct a smear campaign in the United States, the Nazi propagandists promised that Germany would return expropriated land to Native Americans. Convinced that Indians possessed little loyalty to America, Goebbels predicted that they would revolt rather than fight Germany. In a further effort to create an alliance with American Indians, Germany declared that they considered the Sioux, and by extension all Native Americans, to be Aryan. The declaration resulted from a request by a German immigrant, descended from a Sioux grandmother, for German citizenship. Ruling that the immigrant fell within the pale for citizenship, this declaration legitimized Indians as Aryans.

The declaration that Indians were Aryans prompted an immediate denial by Alex Hrdlicka. Hrdlicka, curator of physical anthropology for the Smithsonian Institution, an expert on North American and Central American Indians, and a published author, theorized that Indians migrated either across the Bering Strait or through the Aleutian Islands. Such a migration, accomplished possibly ten or twenty thousand years ago, would imply that Indians descended from either Russian or Chinese ancestry. Therefore, he contended, "by no stretch of the imagination can Indians be considered Aryans." It generated a more heated, sarcastic response from Collier. "Previously the Mormons had been denominating the Indians as 'The Lost Tribe of Israel'," he stated, and added in a paternalistically jealous vein: "Hitler is kidnapping them."

Despite its association with the AIF, the Third Reich preferred to utilize its own agents whenever possible in dealing with Native Americans. In a more subtle approach than that employed by Federation member Towner, Germany attempted to send agents among Indian tribes, posing as anthropologists or writers, in order to learn their culture and languages. German propagandists were particularly interested in learning Indian languages, because they rightfully feared that America would once again use Indian radio operators speaking their tribal languages in the upcoming war as they had done in World War I. At the same time these agents could spread Nazi propaganda and undermine Roosevelt's administrative policies by publicizing unfavorable accounts of American Indian conditions.

One such Nazi agent, Dr. Colin Ross, managed to ingratiate himself at the highest office, when on June 18, 1934, he visited Commissioner John Collier. Representing himself as a correspondent for several German periodicals, Ross told Collier that he had traveled the world studying "the administration of dependent peoples" and had now developed a "deep" interest in Native Americans. Quite impressed with Ross's qualifications, cultured bearing, and intellectual accomplishments, the Commissioner informed over a dozen Indian superintendents that the correspondent would soon be visiting their reservations and asked that they extend every courtesy to Ross and his family traveling with him. When Ross exhibited great curiosity concerning Appalachian whites, North Carolina Highlanders, and Georgia Blacks, the commissioner obliged with several letters of introduction to friends who could supply Ross with information and tours. Aided greatly by Collier, the correspondent completed his tour and returned to Germany.

I came across this and thought it was quite interesting, those "racist Nazis" declared Amerinds to be Aryans. Didn't know that, did you?


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viewtopic.php?t=12464

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viewtopic.php?t=12400

[Hannover]

I find this story to be questionable and unverified.

- Hannover

[christianbethel]

I appreciate your open association with racism, Lamprecht. Very noble of you. Snarkiness aside, I find it believable, for Hitler was a fan of the Sioux Indian warrior Winnetou in his early youth.

[Lamprecht]

I appreciate your open association with racism, Lamprecht. Very noble of you. Snarkiness aside, I find it believable, for Hitler was a fan of the Sioux Indian warrior Winnetou in his early youth.

Association with racism? Not sure what you mean.
"Aryan" was a classification of Caucasoid at this time, it basically meant "indo-European" but as a biological category rather than linguistic.
"Aryan" would have been most simply defined as "Caucasoid, but not Semitic or Hamitic"

See:

“The Aryans (also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten) are one of the three branches of the Caucasian (white race); they are divided into the western (European), that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern (Asiatic) Aryans, that is the Indian (Hindu) and Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd). Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of the two other races, namely the Mongolian (yellow) and the Negroid (black) races; 2. the members of the other two branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites (Jews, Arabs) and Hamites (Berbers). The Finns and Hungarians belong to the Mongolian race; but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of all European Volk are Aryans. . . .“

From:
Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?
viewtopic.php?t=12690

Amerindians were generally classified as "Mongoloid" (along with East Asians) or a separate race altogether.

[HelloKitty]

I'm pretty sure this is not the case. In the text of the Ariernachweis native Americans are explicitly mentioned as being non-Aryan:
"Of Aryan descent is therefore every person that has no ancestry from a (from the perspective of the German people) foreign race. As foreign counts first of all ancestry from the Jews and Gypsies who also live in Europe, that of the Asian and African races, and that of the indigenous population of Australia and the Americas (Indians), while for example and Englishman or Swede, a Frenchman or Czech, a Pole or Italian, when he himself is free from such ancestry, which is also foreign to him, must be considered as related and therefore as Aryan, whether he lives in his homeland, in East-Asia or in America, and whether he is a citizen of the USA or of a South-American republic."

[hermod]

I found something humorous in the following book:

Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II - Jere Bishop Franco
https://archive.is/LzbkC or http://web.archive.org/web/201908140031 ... g/fjMa1OdF

So, the National Socialists thought they could declare Amerindians to be "Aryan" and then an American anthropologist argued against it.

The [American Indian] Federation provided German propaganda agencies with authentic Native Americans, such as Jemison and Towner, who criticized the United State government in cooperation with American pro-Fascist groups. As part of a Fascist intent to conduct a smear campaign in the United States, the Nazi propagandists promised that Germany would return expropriated land to Native Americans. Convinced that Indians possessed little loyalty to America, Goebbels predicted that they would revolt rather than fight Germany. In a further effort to create an alliance with American Indians, Germany declared that they considered the Sioux, and by extension all Native Americans, to be Aryan. The declaration resulted from a request by a German immigrant, descended from a Sioux grandmother, for German citizenship. Ruling that the immigrant fell within the pale for citizenship, this declaration legitimized Indians as Aryans.

I came across this and thought it was quite interesting, those "racist Nazis" declared Amerinds to be Aryans. Didn't know that, did you?

Just shows that any ridiculous BS can be publicly told against the enemy of the day during a war. Ruling that a specific ethnic German with a Sioux grandmother can get German citizenship doesn't amount to regarding all Sioux or all Indians as Aryans!! Obviously! Also exposes American racism at that time. Such a total nonsense could be inferred only in a super-racist country with a one-drop rule (*). A good opportunity to remind that WWII was not a a war between antiracist benevolent rescuers (the "Allies") and racist murderous 2-legged beasts (the "Nazis"). The victors of WWII have vastly distorted the real events & context of that war in order to manufacture their own moral-high-ground legend. But their racially-segregated armies and grotesque anti-Jap propaganda caricatures tell a very different [but true] story...


* American one-drop rule:

One-drop rule

The one-drop rule is a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

[Hektor]

I'm pretty sure this is not the case. In the text of the Ariernachweis native Americans are explicitly mentioned as being non-Aryan:
"Of Aryan descent is therefore every person that has no ancestry from a (from the perspective of the German people) foreign race. As foreign counts first of all ancestry from the Jews and Gypsies who also live in Europe, that of the Asian and African races, and that of the indigenous population of Australia and the Americas (Indians), while for example and Englishman or Swede, a Frenchman or Czech, a Pole or Italian, when he himself is free from such ancestry, which is also foreign to him, must be considered as related and therefore as Aryan, whether he lives in his homeland, in East-Asia or in America, and whether he is a citizen of the USA or of a South-American republic."

I'd guess Extra-European folks would mostly be classed "Non-Aryan". So this would include 'native Americans (whose ancestors exterminated the real native Americans after they immigrated via the Bering Sea)', but not necessarily White Americans.

The assignation 'Aryan', was probably mostly useful for assigning citizenship to people. Not really relevant, when it was about people that anyway don't want to migrate to Germany.
Ironically this is nowadays held against Germans, when they had a "Ariernachweis". It's an example of inversion of logic being applied there.
X was pro A
I hate X
Hence I'm against A.

Unbelievable, but it seems people tick in that associative way.