This study examines the semantics of nobility and aristocracy in National Socialism and the Third Reich. Contrary to the explicitly stated claim that ‘in future there will be only one nobility’ (namely that of ‘labour’), several, in some cases competing, concepts of nobility existed in Nazi Germany. This work examines how these ideas and concepts were semantically filled, how they tied in with the aristocracy of high modernism, and what function they served within the National Socialist ideological arsenal. To this end, it first presents the broad (and sometimes controversial) discourse on (new) nobility in the Weimar Republic, in the context of which the Nazi concepts of nobility also emerged. It then examines the groups that were to belong to the nobility in the Third Reich. Finally, it analyses concepts of nobility in the resistance.
