A primary axiom of National Socialist thinking was that all Western Cultural innovation was the product of the German race — described alternately as German, Germanic, Aryan, or Nordic; only creators of this background could produce genuinely innovative thought and art. Drawing from a German ideological tradition that had evolved over the nineteenth century, Hitler endorsed this view in Mein Kampf:

'All human culture, all results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan...If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as representative of the first group.'

Dennis, David B. Inhumanties: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. http://tiny.cc/k5g2lw