What was Nietzsche's Übermensch, and did the Nazis really get it from him?

The Übermensch is a goal Nietzsche's character Zarathustra proposes for humanity: a new type of human who gives meaning to life on Earth instead of looking to another world. And no, the Nazis did not simply get their ideas from it. The Nazi version of a master race differs greatly from Nietzsche's idea, and neither Hitler nor Nazi propaganda explicitly used the term.

In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself, a shift from otherworldly Christian values to a grounded human ideal. The scene is memorable. Zarathustra arrives in a town where a crowd has gathered to watch a tightrope walker, and tells them that mankind's goal must be a new type of human superior to itself. The crowd greets the speech with scorn and mockery, and the show begins.

Zarathustra urges his listeners to ignore those who promise other-worldly fulfilment and to give meaning to life on Earth. The idea is tied to the death of God: belief in God once gave meaning to life, but 'God is dead' means that the idea of God can no longer provide values, and the Übermensch's new values are meant to be life-affirming and creative.

The English word 'Superman' may be the source of many misreadings. Thomas Common used it in 1909, and Walter Kaufmann blamed this translation for the widespread confusion of Nietzsche's concept with the comic-book character.

As for the Nazis, a racial version of the idea did become a philosophical foundation for Nazi thinking, but it differs greatly from Nietzsche's original, and the term Untermenschen does not originate with Nietzsche, who was critical of both antisemitism and German nationalism. Scholars still debate how the distortion happened: Walter Kaufmann blamed Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth, an ultranationalist who edited his unpublished writings, while an alternative theory places it in the hands of the Nazis themselves.