This research paper analyzes the role played by racism and its significance during World War II. Racism in the form of the German Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan 'race' and the willingness of Adolf Hitler to expand by force Germany's control over the European Continent in order to achieve his racist aims was a principal cause of World War II. Nazi genocidal practices resulted in the destruction of most European Jews and other minorities such as Gypsies. The belief by Japan's ruling militarist clique in their right to rule Japan's Asian and Western colonial neighbors led to their war crimes and atrocities in China, such as the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese Army in 1937-1938, and against Allied Prisoners of War (POWs). Combat in the Pacific between American and Japanese armed forces was characterized by unusual savagery on both sides which stemmed from the racial stereotypes they held toward each other and in particular Japanese fanaticism on the battlefield. On all sides a war which began with mutual reluctance to attack civilian targets ended in a fury of indiscriminate bombings of civilian populations and the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the American home front, the war heightened racial tensions; and the pattern of discrimination by whites against colored peoples which it generated exposed white hypocrisy and paved the way for postwar gains by nonwhites.
Adolf Hitler and other German Nazis saw world affairs largely within the context of racial struggle between their own 'master race' and others. They especially despised Jews whom they saw as conspiring against German well-being. During the 1930s they enacted discriminatory laws such as the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and fomented mob violence against the Jews such as during Kristallnacht in November 1938. As Germany seized Austria and Czechoslovakia and later Poland and most of European Russia, German policy turned toward the oppression of non-Germ...