This pamphlet, illustrated with crude drawings of “Asiatic” and “Jewish” features, circulated over 3.8 million copies. It argued that Untermenschen live in “hordes,” lack any concept of honor, and are driven only by primal urges—lust, greed, and destructive envy.
The Nazi state deployed Untermensch across all media. In print, Der Stürmer regularly featured cartoons of Jews with ape-like features, overlaid with captions like “The Subhuman’s Dream: The German Maiden.” In radio and film, newsreels described the Eastern Front as a battle between Kulturmenschen (cultural humans) and Untermenschen . The 1943 film Die Frontschau (Front Show) showed dead Soviet soldiers with voiceover commentary: “These are not human corpses. These are the remains of subhumans.” untermench
“A biological being, equipped with hands, feet, and a kind of brain, but utterly dissimilar inside. A creature from whose face terror speaks, whose eyes betray a murderous instinct, whose fingers are claws. It is a human-animal mixture.” In print, Der Stürmer regularly featured cartoons of
The Untermensch concept was not mere rhetoric; it had legal force. Under the Nuremberg Laws (1935), Jews were stripped of citizenship, but the Untermensch doctrine went further: it declared that certain groups had no claim to humane treatment under any law. In occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, SS courts refused to prosecute German soldiers for killing Untermenschen unless the killing harmed military discipline. Himmler’s 1941 “Commissar Order” explicitly ordered the execution of Soviet political commissars as “bearers of the subhuman Bolshevik ideology.” A creature from whose face terror speaks, whose
Linguistic dehumanization remains a predictor of genocidal violence. The Rwandan Hutu propaganda radio station RTLM called Tutsis inyenzi (cockroaches)—the same semantic move as Untermensch . Scholars of genocide now treat the term as a warning sign.
Education was key. Hitler Youth manuals included chapters on “Racial Hygiene” that taught children to identify Untermenschen by skull shape, nose form, and behavior. One school exercise asked: “Why must the German people fear the Untermensch ? Answer: Because he breeds faster, lives like an animal, and will drown our culture in his filth.”