character assessment re: physical features

so, inspired by susan hiller's j.street project i saw at the tate last week, i've decided for my FMP, as mentioned briefly in the previous blog, to explore the holocaust as historical event and have begun conducting studies and research.
there is huge amounts of information and images available on the internet and just typing in the world holocaust all sorts of horrifying images come up.
but i've decided to take more of a personal approach, and a more implicit message rather than just throwing harrowing images and stories at the audience.

we were talking in class last week about the shock factor of an image and what has become over the last century or so, socailly acceptable, with sexual and controversial elements becoming more and more commonplace in today's society, nothing seems to be out of place or deemed 'unacceptable' anymore. with artists such as sandy kim documenting her menstruel cycles and art becoming a vehicle with which to push and stretch boundaries; we've gotten, as a culture and a generation preoccupied with physicality. but although art and advertising are consumed with sexual desire and appearances, vanity and controversy are not rooted in this generation, they're age old.

again as documented in my previous post of various found quotes and diagrams that i found interesting. i've found various websites and books that predate the war era, that focus on physicality and the aryan race, but seem to approach it from a so called ''rational'' point of view, with an intellectual slant, such as the aforementioned book ''Vaught's Practical Character Reader.''

the aryan race was a portrayal of  what hitler wanted from an entire country/world. his idea of perfection.

These are some images from Vaught's book, dating 1902

http://resources.ushmm.org/film/search/index.php

decomposition (Vaught’s Practical Character Reader.)

the narrative of destruction, in faith, in culture, in variety. the destruction of a character through age and manipulation, propaganda, manipulated minds.
Like the video of grandma's wedding, a culture who appears seemingly normal, destroyed through unnatural means of process of selection, ''natural selection'' evolution.
Hitler was the tool of erasure. He was determined to manipulate and eradicate a race he considered fungal and parasitic in nature.
Unless you take out the root, you can't destroy a weed. Truth is our root, ahava is our root. It's roots are not of a physical nature, not defined by pigment.

The Perfect Race


what is Aryan?
depicted the aryan race in black and white imagery.
take a selection of pictures of blonde haired blue eyed non jewish girls. all dressed the same. give them maybe a black shirt to wear. (for example)
take the same selection of pictures of blonde haired blue eyed jewish girls.
compare them.
analyse them.
measure their facial appearance spatially.

“The Aryan race is tall, long legged, slim. The race is narrow-faced, with a narrow forehead, a narrow highbuilt nose and a lower jaw and prominent chin, the skin is rosy bright and the blood shines through .... the hair is smooth, straight or wavy - possibly curly in childhood. The colour is blond.”

Description of a ‘pure’ Aryan. From a leaflet ‘The Nazi Race’, 1929.

In Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, Joane Nagel talks about the role that the intersections between ethnicity and sexuality play in nationalist projects–that is, how they are used as groups define who is and isn’t part of the entity defined as “the nation.” Those who are part of the nation are part of “us,” and those outside it are the Other. She brings up the example of Nazi Germany. Clearly ethnicity played a huge part in definitions of nationhood as the Nazis saw it. But as Nagel points out, it went beyond that; individuals were also included or excluded from membership based on other characteristics, including sexuality. Specifically, homosexuals were marked as unworthy of inclusion and were also sent to concentration camps.

This image, found at The Pink Triangle, illustrates the intersection ethnicity and various categories, including sexuality. It shows the various markers Nazis used to identify prisoners.

The bottom row of seven triangles clearly represents different categories of Jews. The fifth column of triangles (they look tan but they were pink) identified homosexuals. The third column (blue) was for immigrants. I believe the first column (red) was for political dissenters, but I’m not certain. We see other specified groups of Jews in the three partly-yellow triangles at the bottom, as well as triangles for Poles and Czechs. I don’t know enough German to figure the others out.

It’s a great example of a nationalist project: we can visibly see here the clear effort to define some groups as Others and the way that both ethnicity and sexuality (and the intersections) can be an important part of that, and even mark individuals as multiply stigmatized.

UPDATE: In comments philoserine and xac offered translations. Here’s xac’s:

[Columns]
red: political
green: professional criminal
blue: emigrant
purple: Jehovah’s Witnesses
pink: homosexual
black: work-shy Reich (not 100% sure wether the meaning here is “rich” or “member of the Third Reich” – more likely the last one though)
black: work-shy
[I thought I read somewhere that black might stand for antisocial, so maybe work-shy was how they defined that?]
[Rows]
1. row (triangles) base colour
2. row: label for reoffenders
3. row: penal camp
4. row: jews
5. row:
yellow triangle/black bordered triangle: jewish race desecrator
red circle with white border: under suspicion to escape
grey ring: ?? prisoner
6. row: left: Example: political jew, reoffender, penal camp
middle: special campaign Wehrmacht (?)
7. row: Pole
Czech

Thanks!

The pink triangle was used by the Nazis in concentration camps to identify and shame homosexuals. This symbol, which was used to label and shame, has been embraced by the gay community as a symbol of pride.

However, in the 1930s & 1940s there was nothing celebratory about the pink triangle. Gays were forced to wear the pink triangle on their breast pockets in the concentration camps to identify them as homosexual to set them apart from other prisoners.
Triangles of various colors were used to identify each category of "undesirable": yellow for Jews, brown of Gypsies, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, blue for immigrants, and pink for homosexuals.
The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards to receive the harshest treatment, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as well.
At the end of the war, when the concentration camps were finally liberated, virtually all of the prisoners were released except those who wore the pink triangle. Many of those with a pink triangle on their pocket were put back in prison and their nightmare continued.
One of the groups that was targeted for extermination by the Nazis continues to be under attack to this day, not just verbally but physically, all over the world: homosexuals. The fact that gays were put in German concentration camps is not known by many. The stories of the survivors reveal an unimaginable cruelty and suffering. It is the same kind of senseless, irrational hatred that still haunts Gays, Jews, Blacks, and other minorities today.
The Taliban in Afghanistan required non-Muslims to wear identifying badges on their clothing, just as the Nazis required their "undesirables" to wear identifying logos so long ago. History repeats itself.
The list of systematic, deliberate and well-orchestrated exterminations is a long one. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 - 1918 in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and the Sudan, and numerous other genocidal campaigns are testament of the world's complacency.
It seems the lessons of the Holocaust and the Pink Triangle have been lost on many. Because "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" we continue to display the Pink Triangle atop Twin Peaks. It is important to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust victims and to remind everyone of the consequences of unchecked hatred.
The Pink Triangle display is also intended as an instrument to initiate discourse about hate crimes. We want to help prevent others from experiencing the results of hatred that Matthew Shepard, Allen Schindler, Brandon Teena, and countless others have been subjected to. If we can help prevent additional crimes like those committed against them, we will have been successful in our attempt to inform the public.

"[The Jews'] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the volkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people"

The book sold over five million copies by the start of World War II.

< After the Second World War, the book was made illegal to reprint or sell new copies in Germany and Austria. It is not illegal to own a book, and it is also not illegal to sell or buy such books second-hand.