Lately stuck on WW2 history.

[Anomalocaris]

You are describing official foreign policy and its implied world view.  I am describing an influential attitude found in the society.  We are talking about members of the society choosing suicide over living past germany’s Defeat.

Popular history tends to focus on overweening german air of racial supremacy between 1870-1945

I was just replying to this simply wrong statement with an elaborated explanation. There was no constant racial supremacy in Germany between 1870-1945. Not in official policy, and much less with the population.

I think you take a narrow view of the phenomenon of assertion of racial supremacy. There are at least two reasons for asserting racial supremacy. One begins with an actual belief, however acquired, in the meaningful superiority of most members of one’s own race over others. Another begin’s with assumption of Darwinian competition between one’s own race and others, and postulates that incocating an belief in its own superiority, regardless of whether the belief is well founded, is essential for survival.

I think the sense that Germany is in Darwinian competition with its European neighbors and it must win had been prevelent in the German society at least as early as 1870s.