The Ahnenerbe was a Schutzstaffel (SS) pseudo-scientific organization which was active in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. It was established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in July 1935 as an SS appendage devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Ahnenerbe was composed of scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines and fostered the idea that the German people descended from an Aryan race which was racially superior to other racial groups.

The Nazi Party of Germany adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its ideology (Nazism) in order to justify the genocide of groups of people which it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race", and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Africans, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior "sub-humans", whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of historical race concepts, 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism, and anti-Semitism, especially racial anti-Semitism. The term "Aryan" generally originated during the discourses about the use of the term Volk.