official Alfred Rosenberg argued for a new "religion of the blood" based
on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its
"noble" character against racial and cultural degeneration. Rosenberg
believed the Nordic race to be descended from Proto-Aryans, a
hypothetical prehistoric people who dwelt on the North German
Plain and who had ultimately originated from the lost continent
of Atlantis.[note 1] Under Rosenberg, the theories of Arthur de
Gobineau, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Blavatsky, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and those of Hitler,[114] all culminated
in Nazi Germany's race policies and the "Aryanization" decrees of the
1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. In its "appalling medical model", the
annihilation of the "racially inferior" Untermenschen was sanctified as
the excision of a diseased organ in an otherwise healthy
body,[115] which led to the Holocaust.
Arno Breker's sculpture Die Partei (The Party) ,
depicting a Nazi-era ideal of the "Nordic Aryan" racial type
According to Nazi racial theorists, the term "Aryans" ( Arier ) described
the Germanic peoples,[116] and they considered the purest Aryans to be
those that belonged to a "Nordic race" physical ideal, which they
referred to as the "master race".[note 2] However, a satisfactory
definition of "Aryan" remained problematic during Nazi
Germany.[118] Although the physical ideal of Nazi racial theorists was
typically the tall, blond haired, and light-eyed Nordic individual, such
theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair and eye