Untermensch is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', that was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs.
Cover of the Nazi propaganda brochure "Der Untermensch" ("The Subhuman"), 1942. The SS booklet depicted the natives of Eastern Europe as "subhumans".
An Austro-Hungarian propaganda poster made during World War I which features the rhyming slogan "Serbia must die!" Such images were representative of the social attitudes underlying the concept of untermensch.
A chart used to illustrate the Nazi Nuremberg Laws introduced in 1935
This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read the Neues Volk, the monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP."
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.
A poster advertising the 1938 Neues Volk calendar depicting racially pure "Aryans"
A chart in 1935 explaining the Nuremberg Laws
Hitler and Mr. Kung Hsiang-hsi meeting in 1937
Hitler meeting Iranian ambassador Mussa Nuri Esfandiari
