Günther's work agreed with Grant's, and the German anthropologist frequently stated that the Germans are definitely not a fully Nordic people. Hitler himself was later to downplay the importance of Nordicism in public for this very reason. The standard tripartite model placed most of the population of Hitler's Germany in the Alpine category, especially after the Anschluss.
J. Kaup led a movement opposed to Günther. Kaup took the view that a German nation, all of whose citizens belonged to a "German race" in a populationist sense, offered a more convenient sociotechnical tool than Günther's concept of an ideal Nordic type to which only a very few Germans could belong.
Nazi legislation identifying the ethnic and "racial" affinities of the Jews reflects the populationist concept of race. Discrimination was not restricted to Jews who belonged to the "Oriental-Armenoid" race, but was directed against all members of the Jewish ethnic population.[65]
The German Jewish journalist Kurt Caro (1905–1979) who emigrated to Paris in 1933 and served in the British army from 1943,[66] published a book under the pseudonym Manuel Humbert unmasking Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in which he stated the following racial composition of the Jewish population of Central Europe:23,8% Lapponid race, 21,5% Nordic race, 20,3% Armenoid race, 18,4% Mediterranean race, 16,0% Oriental race.[67]
By 1939 Hitler had abandoned Nordicist rhetoric in favour of the idea that the German people as a whole were united by distinct "spiritual" qualities.
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In the end, partly as an expedient and partly due to the large degree of overlap between the Jewish race and the Jewish religion, partly caught up in the denominational thought of the last century,
Jews have been classified not according to their race but according to their religion.
The registration of Jews according to race is extremely difficult, above all because of the reduction in their numbers due to secessions, conversions, earlier racial interbreeding and concealment, as shown by the unsuccessful registration of Jews by race in Austria in 1923 and the classification of Jews into full, half and quarter Jews in the German census of 1939. Jewish statistics should generally be interpreted as minimal figures whereby the errors of classification tend to vary in inverse proportion to the amount of Jewish blood.
We have faced almost insurmountable difficulties in the compilation of accurate statistics regarding the Jewish population and its movements in the Eastern Territories since the beginning of the Second World War, which set uncontrollable masses of Jews in movement.
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