The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist & Nationalistic Ideas in Europe

In Nazi Germany between the years 1940 & '44, proof of your Aryan or Semitic roots meant the difference between life & death. How this inhuman & intrinsically absurd theory of racial superiority originated & how it took hold of the German imagination makes for a fascinating, scholarly study. Tracing the origins of the Aryan Myth in the West, the author shows how in the heyday of nationalism most European people developed legends glorifying their high born ancestry. He shows how these legends developed into pseudoscientific theories, which treated Europeans as the norm & other peoples as inferior--until in 19th-century Germany they culminated in the invention of a superior Germanic race in contrast to the inferior Jewish race. This cultural study sheds horrifying new light on the philosophy that justified the mass extermination of millions of "subhumans" during WWII.