The slogans »Blutgemeinschaft« (kinship community) and »Aryan« played an important role in National Socialist propaganda. They provided the ideological basis for the exclusion, disenfranchisement, and murder of millions of people.

»Aryan« is a term first used in the 19th century as a linguistic designation for a historically not verifiable Proto-Indo-European population, whose original home-land linguists reconstructed to be the Indian subcontinent. »Völkisch«-racist ideologues assigned this linguistic hypothesis to humans and developed a scientifically totally untenable theory of origin linking it with a claim to a supposed cultural superiority. Also in the 19th century, the »blood myth« originating in Antiquity was revived. It is based on the unscientific assumption that blood carries certain "characteristics" of a people. National Socialism linked the »Aryan-« and the »blood myth« – which was, although inspired by the natural sciences, in itself unscientific – to »racial thinking:« according to it the German »Blutgemeinschaft« was part of the Aryan race. The »blood and Aryan myth« was a crucial ideological driving force in the National Socialist war of invasion and annihilation.