Why did Hitler want a 'pure' Aryan race?

Answer

Hitler wanted a pure Aryan race, people with blue eyes, blonde hair, muscular (in the case of men) and beautiful (the case of women). He wanted all Germans to be racially pure because he wanted to start his own "super" perfect race, even though he did not have blonde hair or blue eyes! Also there was a lot of speculation about him being homosexual, even though he sent homosexuals to concentration camps etc.

Answer

He believed them to be superior. As for the view that the Nazis wanted a pure "blonde-haired blue-eyed" race, that is largely a popular myth. The Nazis aimed to ensure that all members of the state were of "pure" Germanic stock. In practice that usually meant proving that one's ancestry for three generations past was free of any mixing with "non-Aryans", i.e. Jews, Asians, Africans.

However, the emphasis was always on ancestry, which was tested through records. There was no test based on the individual's hair or eye colour. The only cases in which the actual physical characteristics of an individual were taken into account were where "pure" Germanic ancestry could not be documented to the required extent.

Obviously German propaganda depicted individuals with a handsome appearance and with North European features. But blondness was not an exclusive characteristic. Propaganda films, such as films showing members of the Hitler youth, or girls doing gymnastics, display the normal range of physical features found among German, e.g. many blondes, but also many persons of darker colouring.

Comments

1. The 'ideal German' was also supposed to be tall, slender, phyically fit, free of any disability, deformity, abnormality or mental illness, sexually 'straight' as a poker, chaste, and completely immune to Marxism. Smoking, heavy drinking and taking drugs were also a complete 'no-no'. It wasn't only a matter of appearance.
2. A key catchphrase was 'a sound mind in a healthy body'. (It was sometimes said at the time that this really meant 'a servile, conformist, obedient mind in a body fit for military service' - or in the case of women 'a fertile body').
3. The only member of the Nazi leadership who bore any physical resemblance to the 'ideal German' was Reinhard Heydrich. During the Nazi period jokes circulated in Germany about being 'blond as Hitler, slim as Goering, chaste as Goebbels' and so on.
4. According to some sources, the Nazi leader who took all this most seriously was Himmler. Hitler's main concern was to 'get rid' of the Jews. He wasn't too interested in eye or hair colour. After all, he himself was far removed in appearance from the 'ideal type' ...
5. As for the question of what Germans actually looked like, this may be of some interest: I have a group photo of the 1929 graduation class at the Augusta-Schule in Berlin. Of the 19 girls in the photo only one is truly blonde, though one other is very light brunette. The others are all brunette, on a range from fairly light to very dark. Obviously, the sample may not be representative - Joncey

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First answer by ID0000000000. Last edit by Joncey. Contributor trust: 1935 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 202 [recommend question]