I'm confused. Was not practically all the governments of the world 'racist' during that period and before? Also correct me if i am wrong but hitlers 'racism' was mainly directed towards slavs,but slavs are white racially...so how is it racism?
Anti-semitism is not racism either i believe...its a category all by itself.
Can we just call it what it is?
Xenophobia? Hatred?![]()
*WE* consider Slavs to be part of the category "white". The Nazis didn't.
"Jewish" can be either a religious or an ethnic characterization. There are plenty of atheists around who consider themselves Jews, because they come from Jewish families.
The Nazis in particular held it to be a ethnicity. Converting to Christianity; or even having been a practicing, believing, devout Christian one's whole life; was irrelevant to Nazi racial categorization. If one of your grandparents was a Jew, you were a Jew.
TL;DR: people were different in the past. And sometimes foreign people really are foreign. By our standards, Nazis should have considered Slavs the same as Aryans; the actual Nazis didn't.
Still TL;DR? Try: Yes, Nazi beliefs don't make much sense to most of us now.