Racism was pan-European public opinion before it was German state doctrine

Evidence

IF RACE-THINKING were a German invention, as it has been sometimes asserted, then “German thinking” (whatever that may be) was victorious in many parts of the spiritual world long before the Nazis started their ill-fated attempt at world conquest. Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 430