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63-563: Untermensch ( German pronunciation: [ˈʔʊntɐˌmɛnʃ] ; plural : Untermenschen ) is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or ' subhuman ', which was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to their opponents and non- Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews , Roma , and Slavs (mainly ethnic Poles , Belarusians , Czechs , Ukrainians , Serbs , and Russians ). The term

126-743: A massive plural and a numerative plural , the first implying a large mass and the second implying division. For example, "the waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of [each of] the Great Lakes". Ghil'ad Zuckermann uses the term superplural to refer to massive plural. He argues that the Australian Aboriginal Barngarla language has four grammatical numbers: singular, dual, plural and superplural . For example: A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of inflection , including

189-399: A derivational prefix, some of the neoclassical combining forms may or may not qualify for inclusion in such a list. This list takes the broad view that acro- and auto- count as English derivational prefixes because they function the same way like that of prefixes such as over- and self- do. As for numeral prefixes , only the most common members of that class are included here. There

252-415: A lesser extent) dual are extremely rare. Languages with numerical classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all, though they are likely to have plural personal pronouns . Some languages (like Mele-Fila ) distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion. The distinction between

315-578: A minimal amount of Slavic genes and considerable admixtures of Germanic and Turkic blood. In order to forge a strategic alliance with the Independent State of Croatia – a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Kingdom of Bulgaria , the Nazis deviated from a strict interpretation of their racial ideology, and Croats were officially described as "more Germanic than Slav",

378-512: A notion supported by Croatia's fascist ( Ustashe ) dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained that the "Croats were descendants of the ancient Goths " and "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". Hitler also deemed the Bulgarians to be " Turkoman " in origin. While the Nazis were inconsistent in the implementation of their policy – for instance, mostly implementing

441-654: A part of the formation of nouns, prefixes are less common in Russian than suffixes, but alter the meaning of a word. In German, derivatives formed with prefixes may be classified in two categories: those used with substantives and adjectives, and those used with verbs. For derivative substantives and adjectives, only two productive prefixes are generally addable to any substantive or adjective as of 1970: un- , which expresses negation (as in ungesund , from gesund ), and ur- , which means "original, primitive" in substantives, and has an emphatic function in adjectives. ge- , on

504-544: A plural form can pull double duty as the singular form (or vice versa), as has happened with the word "data" . The plural is used, as a rule, for quantities other than one (and other than those quantities represented by other grammatical numbers, such as dual, which a language may possess). Thus it is frequently used with numbers higher than one ( two cats , 101 dogs , four and a half hours ) and for unspecified amounts of countable things ( some men , several cakes , how many lumps? , birds have feathers ). The precise rules for

567-631: A plural sense, as in the government are agreed . The reverse is also possible: the United States is a powerful country . See synesis , and also English plural § Singulars as plural and plurals as singular . In part-of-speech tagging notation, tags are used to distinguish different types of plurals based on their grammatical and semantic context. Resolution varies, for example the Penn-Treebank tagset (~36 tags) has two tags: NNS - noun, plural, and NPS - Proper noun, plural , while

630-494: A plural when it means water from a particular source ( different waters make for different beers ) and in expressions like by the waters of Babylon . Certain collective nouns do not have a singular form and exist only in the plural, such as " clothes ". There are also nouns found exclusively or almost exclusively in the plural, such as the English scissors . These are referred to with the term plurale tantum . Occasionally,

693-493: A prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy , it creates the word unhappy . The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre- (meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots . This is a fairly comprehensive, although not exhaustive, list of derivational prefixes in English. Depending on precisely how one defines

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756-628: A racial sense, for example, it was used in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane . Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, into English, Untermensch is usually translated as "subhuman". The leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard was Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this

819-600: A thousand times more valuable than the population [of the Ukraine]. (emphasis added) Further reading Plural Words of other types, such as verbs , adjectives and pronouns , also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns. Some languages also have a dual (denoting exactly two of something) or other systems of number categories. However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are

882-408: A word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case , person and gender , as well as marking of categories belonging to the word itself (such as tense of verbs, degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.) Verbs often agree with their subject in number (as well as in person and sometimes gender). Examples of plural forms are

945-541: Is a large separate table covering them all at Numeral prefix > Table of number prefixes in English . binomial , "two terms" dipole , "two poles" The choice between hyphenation or solid styling for prefixes in English is covered at Hyphen > Prefixes and suffixes . Commonly used prefixes in Japanese include お〜 ( o- ) and ご〜 ( go- ) . They are used as part of the honorific system of speech , and are used as markers for politeness, showing respect for

1008-472: Is around 50 pages long and consists, for the most part, of photos portraying the natives of Eastern Europe in an extremely negative way. Nearly four million copies of the pamphlet were printed in the German language and distributed across German-occupied territories. The contents of the " Der Untermensch " brochure extensively emphasized Himmler's racist demonization of Russians as "bestial untermenschen " and Jews as "the decisive leader of untermenschen ". It

1071-664: Is more of a cultural type. Once the war was won by the rebel side, Francoism advocated, as in Nazi Germany, the search for the new man , leading to harsh repression of the Spanish population . It can be quoted the declarations of Gonzalo de Aguilera , press officer of the nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War , to the journalist John T. Whitaker : "We have to kill, kill, you know? They are like animals, you know, and we cannot expect them to get rid of

1134-495: Is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself." The most notorious example of the usage of the term Untermensch by the Nazis is a Schutzstaffel (SS) brochure entitled " Der Untermensch  [ de ] ", distributed by the Reich Security Main Office under the directives of Heinrich Himmler . Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa , it

1197-503: Is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."] Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability which is imposed by the social order in which he lives". It is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an opposite of Friedrich Nietzsche 's Übermensch (superman) concept. Stoddard does not explicitly say this, but he critically refers to

1260-579: Is used after zéro . English also tends to use the plural with decimal fractions , even if less than one, as in 0.3 metres , 0.9 children . Common fractions less than one tend to be used with singular expressions: half (of) a loaf , two-thirds of a mile . Negative numbers are usually treated the same as the corresponding positive ones: minus one degree , minus two degrees . Again, rules on such matters differ between languages. In some languages, including English, expressions that appear to be singular in form may be treated as plural if they are used with

1323-661: The Final Solution while also implementing Generalplan Ost – the democidal death toll was in the range of tens of millions of victims. It is related to the concept of " life unworthy of life ", a more specific term which originally referred to the severely disabled who were involuntarily euthanised in Aktion T4 , and was eventually applied to the extermination of the Jews. That policy of euthanasia started officially on 1 September 1939 when Hitler signed an edict to

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1386-597: The French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger . In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural). Adjectives may agree with the noun they modify; examples of plural forms are the French petits and petites (the masculine plural and feminine plural respectively of petit ). The same applies to some determiners – examples are

1449-601: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact expired, Russians also started to be seen as "subhumans". Similarly, Belarusians , Czechs , Serbs , Slovaks , and Ukrainians were considered to be inferior. Nonetheless, there were Slavs such as Bosniaks , Bulgarians , and Croats who collaborated with Nazi Germany that were still being perceived as not racially "pure" enough to reach the status of Germanic peoples , yet they were eventually considered ethnically better than other Slavs, mostly due to theories about these nations having

1512-566: The Navajo language are formed from a word stem and multiple affixes. For example, each verb requires one of four non-syllabic prefixes ( ∅ , ł , d , l ) to create a verb theme. In the Sunwar language of Eastern Nepal , the prefix ma- म is used to create negative verbs . It is the only verbal prefix in the language. ma .rimʃo NEG .nice al child   ma .rimʃo al NEG.nice child Bad child! (scolding) As

1575-620: The Slavs , as even prior to World War II, Slavs – particularly the Poles – were deemed to be inferior to Germans and other Aryans. After Adolf Hitler gained political power in Germany, the concept of non-Aryan "sub-human slave-material" was developed and started to be used also towards other Slavic peoples. Poles were at the bottom of the Slavic "racial hierarchy" established by the Nazis. Soon after

1638-470: The "rabbit family" or to "stolid animals" that were "idle" and "disorganized" and spread like a "wave of filth". However, some among the Slavs who happened to have Nordic racial features were deemed to have distant Germanic descent which meant partially "Aryan" origin, and if under 10 years old, they were to be Germanized (see: kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany ). The Nazis were utterly contemptuous of

1701-699: The "superman" idea at the end of his book (p. 262). Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and roots almost at will in order to create new words, this development can be considered logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der Stechlin . Nietzsche used Untermensch at least once in contrast to Übermensch in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882). Earlier examples of Untermensch include Romanticist Jean Paul using

1764-473: The CLAWS 7 tagset (~149 tags) uses six: NN2 - plural common noun, NNL2 - plural locative noun, NNO2 - numeral noun, plural, NNT2 - temporal noun, plural, NNU2 - plural unit of measurement, NP2 - plural proper noun. Prefix (linguistics) A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative , because it alters

1827-876: The Conduct of the Troops in Russia ” issued by the German High Command in 19 May 1941, ordered German troops to target Jews, partisans, Bolsheviks, etc. and described the war in Eastern Europe as a "historic task to liberate the German people once forever from the Asiatic-Jewish danger". In 1943 Himmler issued a secret order for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in order to eliminate the "living space" of 500,000 Untermenschen , unsuitable for

1890-434: The French plural definite article les , and the English demonstratives these and those . It is common for pronouns , particularly personal pronouns , to have distinct plural forms. Examples in English are we ( us , etc.) and they ( them etc.; see English personal pronouns ), and again these and those (when used as demonstrative pronouns ). In Welsh, a number of common prepositions also inflect to agree with

1953-873: The Germans. The Nazis divided the people who they considered the sub-humans into different types; they placed priority on the extermination of the Jews, and the exploitation of others as slaves. Historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes that for the Nazis, "it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch , which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of Judeo-Bolshevism ." The Untermensch concept included Jews, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and Slavic peoples such as Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs and Russians. Slavs were regarded as Untermenschen , barely fit for exploitation as slaves. Hitler and Goebbels compared them to

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2016-675: The Nazi officials (summarized as Generalplan Ost ) envisioned the ethnic cleansing and extermination of no fewer than 50 million people, who were not considered fit for Germanization , from territories it wanted to conquer in Europe. Nazi planners considered Ukraine's chernozem ("black earth") soil as a particularly desirable zone for colonization. During the war, Nazi propaganda instructed Wehrmacht officers to tell their soldiers to target people whom they considered "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans". In addition, Nazi Germany conducted its warfare against

2079-615: The Nazi regime used soldiers from some Slavic countries, firstly from the Reich's allies Croatia and Slovakia as well as within occupied territories. The concept of the Slavs in particular being Untermenschen served the Nazis' political goals; it was used to justify their expansionist policy and especially their aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union in order to achieve Lebensraum , particularly in Ukraine . Early plans of

2142-520: The Slavic population of East-Central Europe was to be reduced in part through mass murder in the Holocaust for Lebensraum , with a significant amount expelled further east to Siberia and used as forced labour in the Reich. These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy . It is widely believed that the term "under man" was coined by the Nazis, but this belief is incorrect because

2205-644: The Soviet Union as a racial war targeting Jews, Romanis , Slavs , and various indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe who were categorized as "untermenschen" in the Nazi ideology. Nazis viewed Russians as animalistic sub-humans who were incapable of mounting any form of collective resistance against a German invasion. Nazi anti-Slavism was also tied to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory; which claimed that Slavs were inferior people controlled by Jews as pawns in their plots against Aryans. Prior to

2268-501: The addition of affixes , like the English -(e)s and -ies suffixes , or ablaut , as in the derivation of the plural geese from goose , or a combination of the two. Some languages may also form plurals by reduplication , but not as productively. It may be that some nouns are not marked for plural at all, like sheep and series in English. In languages which also have a case system, such as Latin and Russian , nouns can have not just one plural form but several, corresponding to

2331-503: The dual and paucal can be found in some Slavic and Baltic languages (apart from those that preserve the dual number, such as Slovene ). These are known as "pseudo-dual" and "pseudo-paucal" grammatical numbers. For example, Polish and Russian use different forms of nouns with the numerals 2, 3, or 4 (and higher numbers ending with these ) than with the numerals 5, 6, etc. (genitive singular in Russian and nominative plural in Polish in

2394-454: The effect, and carbon monoxide was first used to murder disabled patients. The same gas was used in the death camps such as Treblinka , although they used engine exhaust gases to achieve the same end. In directive No. 1306 by Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 24 October 1939, the term "Untermensch" is used in reference to Polish ethnicity and culture, as follows: It must become clear to everybody in Germany, even to

2457-463: The form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional , creating a new form of a word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category , or derivational , creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category . Prefixes, like all affixes, are usually bound morphemes . English has no inflectional prefixes, using only suffixes for that purpose. Adding

2520-430: The former case, genitive plural in the latter case). Also some nouns may follow different declension patterns when denoting objects which are typically referred to in pairs. For example, in Polish, the noun " oko ", among other meanings, may refer to a human or animal eye or to a drop of oil on water. The plural of " oko " in the first meaning is " oczy " (even if actually referring to more than two eyes), while in

2583-455: The forming of the past participle of verbs; ver- has an emphatic function, or it is used to turn a substantive or an adjective into a verb. In some cases, the prefix particle ent- (negation) can be considered the opposite of particle be- , while er- can be considered the opposite of ver- . The prefix er- usually indicates the successful completion of an action, and sometimes the conclusion means death. With fewer verbs, it indicates

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2646-482: The heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without. In his speech " Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus " ("World danger of Bolshevism") in 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that "subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent ". At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels also declared that, “Bolshevism

2709-575: The last milkmaid, that Polishness is equal to subhumanity. Poles, Jews and Gypsies are on the same inferior level. This must be clearly outlined [...] until every citizen of Germany has it encoded in his subconsciousness that every Pole, whether a farm worker or intellectual, should be treated like vermin. Biology classes in Nazi-era Germany schools taught about differences between the race of Nordic German " Übermenschen " and "ignoble" Jewish and Slavic "subhumans". The view that Slavs were subhuman

2772-604: The launch of Operation Barbarossa , the Wehrmacht 's High Command began issuing orders to enable German soldiers to indiscriminately target the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and unleash systematic violence against entire populations. German Army was instructed to grant carte blanche to the anti-Jewish massacres carried out by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in German-occupied territories. “ Guidelines for

2835-655: The lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel. (In French, however, this plural suffix is often not pronounced.) This construction is also found in German and Dutch, but only in some nouns. Suffixing is cross-linguistically the most common method of forming plurals. In Welsh , the reference form, or default quantity, of some nouns is plural, and the singular form is formed from it, e.g., llygod , mice -> llygoden , mouse; erfin , turnips -> erfinen , turnip. In many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of grammatical agreement with plural nouns (or noun phrases ). Such

2898-468: The newspapers, without explanations of the specific meaning, so it can be deduced that they were general knowledge. They are terms that increase in intensity during the October Events , and during the civil war . As the civil war approaches or takes place, there is a divergence in the meaning of subhuman, on the rebel side it acquires a racial/ eugenic meaning, while on the republican side it

2961-411: The number, person, and sometimes gender of the noun or pronoun they govern. Certain nouns do not form plurals. A large class of such nouns in many languages is that of uncountable nouns , representing mass or abstract concepts such as air , information , physics . However, many nouns of this type also have countable meanings or other contexts in which a plural can be used; for example water can take

3024-502: The only grammatical numbers, except for possible remnants of dual number in pronouns such as both and either . In many languages, there is also a dual number (used for indicating two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include trial (for three objects) and paucal (for an imprecise but small number of objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those. However, numbers besides singular, plural, and (to

3087-427: The other hand, expresses union or togetherness, but only in a closed group of words—it cannot simply be added to any noun or adjective. Verbal prefixes commonly in use are be- , ent- , er- , ge- , miss- , ver- , and zer- (see also Separable verb ). be- expresses strengthening or generalization. ent- expresses negation. ge- indicates the completion of an action, which is why its most common use has become

3150-451: The paucal, the plural, and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, in discussing oranges, the paucal number might imply fewer than ten, whereas for the population of a country, it might be used for a few hundred thousand. The Austronesian languages of Sursurunga and Lihir have extremely complex grammatical number systems, with singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Traces of

3213-646: The person or thing they are affixed to, notably also being used euphemistically . In the Bantu languages of Africa , which are agglutinating , the noun class is conveyed through prefixes, which is declined and agrees with all of its arguments accordingly. ò-mú -límí AG - CL1 -farmer ò-mú -néné AG - CL1 -fat ò-mú -kâddé AG - CL1 -old ò-mú AG .one à-∅-gênda he- PRES -go ò-mú -límí ò-mú -néné ò-mú -kâddé ò-mú à-∅-gênda AG-CL1-farmer AG-CL1-fat AG-CL1-old AG.one he-PRES-go The one, old, fat farmer goes. Verbs in

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3276-483: The pseudo-dual as plural of "eyes" עין / עינים ‎ ʿạyin / ʿēnạyim "eye / eyes" as well as "hands", "legs" and several other words are retained. For further information, see Dual (grammatical number) § Hebrew . Certain nouns in some languages have the unmarked form referring to multiple items, with an inflected form referring to a single item. These cases are described with the terms collective number and singulative number . Some languages may possess

3339-573: The second it is " oka " (even if actually referring to exactly two drops). Traces of dual can also be found in Modern Hebrew . Biblical Hebrew had grammatical dual via the suffix -ạyim as opposed to ־ים ‎ -īm for masculine words . Contemporary use of a true dual number in Hebrew is chiefly used in words regarding time and numbers. However, in Biblical and Modern Hebrew,

3402-414: The subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside this being is a cruel chaos of wild, unrestrained passions, nameless desire for destruction, the most primitive desires, the most naked meanness. In Spain , in addition to the term under man, the terms subhuman and degenerate are frequent in speeches and articles, especially from the 1930s. These are words used naturally in

3465-689: The term "under man" was first used by the American author and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man . Stoddard applies the term to those who he considers unable to function in civilization , which he generally (but not entirely) attributes to race . The Nazi Party later adopted it from the title of the book's German edition Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). The German word Untermensch had been used in earlier periods, but it had not been used in

3528-622: The term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan (Chapter "8. Hundposttag"). In a speech which he delivered to the Bavarian regional parliament in 1927, the Nazi Party propagandist Julius Streicher , publisher of Der Stürmer , used the term Untermensch referring to the communists of the German Bavarian Soviet Republic : It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When

3591-442: The unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament. The Nazi party and thereafter also the regime (1933—1945) repeatedly used the term Untermensch in writings and speeches which they directed against the Jews. In the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization", published in 1936, Himmler wrote: We shall take care that never again in Germany,

3654-399: The use of plurals, however, depends on the language – for example Russian uses the genitive singular rather than the plural after certain numbers (see above). Treatments differ in expressions of zero quantity: English often uses the plural in such expressions as no injuries and zero points , although no (and zero in some contexts) may also take a singular. In French, the singular form

3717-481: The various cases. The inflection might affect multiple words, not just the noun; the noun itself need not become plural as such, with other parts of the expression indicating the plurality. In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an - s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals .) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to

3780-515: The virus of Bolshevism. After all, rats and lice are the carriers of the plague. Now I hope you understand what we mean by the regeneration of Spain... Our programme consists... of exterminating one third of the male population of Spain. That would cleanse the country and get rid of the proletariat. And it is also economically convenient. There will be no more unemployment in Spain, do you understand?" When faced with increasing military manpower shortages,

3843-472: Was also applied to " Mischling " (persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry) and black people . Jewish, Slavic, and Romani people, along with the physically and mentally disabled , as well as homosexuals and political dissidents , and on rare instances, POWs from Western Allied armies , were to be exterminated in the Holocaust . According to the Generalplan Ost ,

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3906-402: Was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and seven other languages. It gives the following definition of an Untermensch : The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being. Although it has features similar to a human,

3969-484: Was widespread among the German masses, and chiefly applied to the Poles. It continued to find support after the war. Notes We are the Master Race and must govern hard but just ... I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss ... The population must work, work, and work again [...] We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically

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