An increasingly extreme racial policy that was carried out by the Nazi regime (1933-45), culminating in genocide. Nazi ideologists produced a coherent and systematic body of thought that drew on a number of older racist themes. Right-wing political theory had earlier emphasized the dangers of mixing the blood of different races. The Aryan race, which predominated in northern Europe, was to be the focus of German national pride. Other racial groups, in particular the Jews, were singled out as sources of Germany’s recent problems. Popular feelings of anti-Semitism, widespread in central and eastern Europe, were turned into state policy.
The Nazi state was established after a century of German pride in the quality of its science. The Nazis accepted this, though they made a distinction between the scorned Jewish science, which tended to be abstract and theoretical, and the more respected Aryan science, which was more experimental and practical.