Untermensch
Encyclopedia
Untermensch is a term that became infamous when the Nazi
racial
ideology
used it to describe "inferior people", especially "the masses from the East," that is Jews
, Gypsies, Poles
along with other Slavic people like the Russians
, Serbs
, Belarussians and Ukrainians
. Although Nazis despised ethnic Slavs they decided that some Slavs were members of the Nordic race and racially fit to be Germans
. Slavs that were considered by the Nazis to be part of the Nordic race would be subject to Germanisation
. The Nazis did not discriminate against Slavs such as the Croatians and the Slovaks
because they joined the Axis powers
.
Although usually considered to have been coined by the Nazis themselves, the term "under man" in the above mentioned sense was actually first used by American author Lothrop Stoddard
in the title of his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).
The German word "Untermensch" itself had been used earlier (not in a racial sense), for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane
(see below). Since most writers who employ the term do not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language (and therefore do not seem to be aware of Stoddard's original term "under man"), "Untermensch" is usually back-translated into English as "sub-human." A leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European
"under man" to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg
who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."] Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man -- the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.
However, it is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an antipode to Friedrich Nietzsche
's Übermensch
(or superman) concept. Stoddard doesn't say so explicitly, but he refers critically to the "superman" idea at the end of his book (p. 262). Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and root
s almost at will in order to create new words, this development was even somewhat logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane
contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der StechlinAs a matter of fact, even Nietzsche himself used "Untermensch" at least once in contrast to "Übermensch
" in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), however he did so in reference to semi-human creatures in mythology
, naming them alongside dwarves, fairies
, centaur
s and so on. Earlier examples of "Untermensch" include Romanticist Jean Paul
using the term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan
(Chapter "8. Hundposttag").
Stoddard's book-long diatribe dealt with the recent takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia
, arguing that that country was now ruled by the most degenerate people on the Earth. He thought that the combination of the alleged inherent racial inferiority of Russian Slavs, the idiocy (as he saw it) of a political creed that appealed to the vilest human instincts (e.g. jealousy towards the more gifted and the more affluent) and the supposed fact that the Communist Party
's rank and file
consisted of "born criminals" in the most conventional sense of the word necessitated a completely new term to describe this phenomenon: "the under man." In this sense, for Stoddard, the October Revolution
was the battle cry for an upcoming, unavoidable clash of the civilized nations with the "masses of the east." If the white race was intent upon winning that confrontation with the "under man," so the message went, it had to turn away from ill-conceived liberal ideas and adopt drastic changes of policy instead, e.g. by introducing far-ranging eugenics
programmes.
The available literature on Nazi Germany would not support the claim that Stoddard's writings were more to the Nazis than a neat summary of racial, social, and political theories that already were or would soon become part and parcel of the ideology of the Nazi party.
The term "Untermensch" was utilized repeatedly in writings and speeches directed against the Jews, the most notorious example being a 1935 SS publication with the title "Der Untermensch" which contains an antisemitic
tirade sometimes considered to be an extract from a speech held by Heinrich Himmler
. In the pamphlet The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization, Himmler wrote in 1936: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without."
Another example for using the term "Untermensch," this time in connection with anti-Soviet propaganda, is another brochure, again titled "Der Untermensch", edited by Himmler and distributed by the Race and Settlement Head Office. Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa
, it is around fifty pages long and consists for the most part of photos casting an extremely negative light on the enemy (see link below for the title page). 3,860,995 copies were printed in the German language. It was also translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Czech and seven other languages. The pamphlet states the following:
Historian Robert Jan van Pelt
writes that for the Nazis, "it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch, which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of Judeo-Bolshevism."
This concept included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), non-Europeans (although the number of black Africans, for example, was too small in 1940s Europe) and some of the Slavic peoples (named as Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Serbs and Czechoslovaks).
However, the "Untermensch" policy toward Slavic peoples was far from consistent. The Jasenovac
concentration camp in Croatia, operated by Croatian fascists called Ustase
, for example, exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs alongside tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies and a few thousand Croat political dissidents. However, as close relatives of Serbs, the Slavic Croats not only formed units within the SS and other German battalions, but were a part of the Axis alliance. In effect, Hitler's intent was to cull the numbers of Slavic peoples, who both then and now were the most numerous of the European peoples. The "Untermensch" policy made the execution of such policy more effective, by purporting "quasi-scientific
" impetus, so such inconsistent application of the policy was logical, as the Nazis did not seek complete destruction of the Slavic peoples, whom they saw as a valuable source of expansion for the post-war Reich.
Nazi anthropologists attempted to scientifically prove the inherent 'inferiority' of the Slavs. However, they were forced to gloss over their findings which consistently found that Early Slavs
were dolicocephalic and fair haired, i.e. "Nordic", not to mention the large proportion of Slavic ancestry in Hitler's native Austria. The concept of the Slavic people being "Untermensch" in particular served the Nazis as justification for their genocidal
policies and especially their aggression against Poland
and the Soviet Union
in order to conquer Lebensraum
, particularly in Ukraine. Early plans of the German Reich (summarized as Generalplan Ost
) envisaged the displacement, enslavement, and elimination of no less than 50 million people who were not considered fit for Germanization from territories it wanted to conquer in Eastern Europe, Ukraine's "chornozem" (black earth) soil being a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the "Herrenvolk". See also Genocides in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
racial
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
used it to describe "inferior people", especially "the masses from the East," that is Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, Gypsies, Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
along with other Slavic people like the Russians
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
, Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
, Belarussians and Ukrainians
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
. Although Nazis despised ethnic Slavs they decided that some Slavs were members of the Nordic race and racially fit to be Germans
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
. Slavs that were considered by the Nazis to be part of the Nordic race would be subject to Germanisation
Germanisation
Germanisation is both the spread of the German language, people and culture either by force or assimilation, and the adaptation of a foreign word to the German language in linguistics, much like the Romanisation of many languages which do not use the Latin alphabet...
. The Nazis did not discriminate against Slavs such as the Croatians and the Slovaks
Slovaks
The Slovaks, Slovak people, or Slovakians are a West Slavic people that primarily inhabit Slovakia and speak the Slovak language, which is closely related to the Czech language.Most Slovaks today live within the borders of the independent Slovakia...
because they joined the Axis powers
Axis Powers
The Axis powers , also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was an alignment of great powers during the mid-20th century that fought World War II against the Allies. It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and...
.
Etymology
Lothrop Stoddard
Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, journalist, racial anthropologist, eugenicist, political theorist and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are cited by historians as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.- Biography :Stoddard was...
in the title of his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).
The German word "Untermensch" itself had been used earlier (not in a racial sense), for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.-Youth:Fontane was born in Neuruppin into a Huguenot family. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an...
(see below). Since most writers who employ the term do not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language (and therefore do not seem to be aware of Stoddard's original term "under man"), "Untermensch" is usually back-translated into English as "sub-human." A leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
"under man" to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" ["...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."] Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man -- the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.
However, it is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an antipode to Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
's Übermensch
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....
(or superman) concept. Stoddard doesn't say so explicitly, but he refers critically to the "superman" idea at the end of his book (p. 262). Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and root
Root
In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant that typically lies below the surface of the soil. This is not always the case, however, since a root can also be aerial or aerating . Furthermore, a stem normally occurring below ground is not exceptional either...
s almost at will in order to create new words, this development was even somewhat logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.-Youth:Fontane was born in Neuruppin into a Huguenot family. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an...
contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der StechlinAs a matter of fact, even Nietzsche himself used "Untermensch" at least once in contrast to "Übermensch
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....
" in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), however he did so in reference to semi-human creatures in mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
, naming them alongside dwarves, fairies
Fairy
A fairy is a type of mythical being or legendary creature, a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural or preternatural.Fairies resemble various beings of other mythologies, though even folklore that uses the term...
, centaur
Centaur
In Greek mythology, a centaur or hippocentaur is a member of a composite race of creatures, part human and part horse...
s and so on. Earlier examples of "Untermensch" include Romanticist Jean Paul
Jean Paul
Jean Paul , born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.-Life and work:...
using the term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan
Orangutan
Orangutans are the only exclusively Asian genus of extant great ape. The largest living arboreal animals, they have proportionally longer arms than the other, more terrestrial, great apes. They are among the most intelligent primates and use a variety of sophisticated tools, also making sleeping...
(Chapter "8. Hundposttag").
Stoddard's book-long diatribe dealt with the recent takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, arguing that that country was now ruled by the most degenerate people on the Earth. He thought that the combination of the alleged inherent racial inferiority of Russian Slavs, the idiocy (as he saw it) of a political creed that appealed to the vilest human instincts (e.g. jealousy towards the more gifted and the more affluent) and the supposed fact that the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
's rank and file
Rank and file
In politics and labor unions the rank and file are the individual members of an organization, exclusive of its leadership. The phrase originated in the military, denoting the horizontal "ranks" and vertical "files" of individual foot-soldiers, exclusive of the noncommissioned officers....
consisted of "born criminals" in the most conventional sense of the word necessitated a completely new term to describe this phenomenon: "the under man." In this sense, for Stoddard, the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
was the battle cry for an upcoming, unavoidable clash of the civilized nations with the "masses of the east." If the white race was intent upon winning that confrontation with the "under man," so the message went, it had to turn away from ill-conceived liberal ideas and adopt drastic changes of policy instead, e.g. by introducing far-ranging eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
programmes.
The available literature on Nazi Germany would not support the claim that Stoddard's writings were more to the Nazis than a neat summary of racial, social, and political theories that already were or would soon become part and parcel of the ideology of the Nazi party.
Nazi propaganda and policy
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
tirade sometimes considered to be an extract from a speech held by Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
. In the pamphlet The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization, Himmler wrote in 1936: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without."
Another example for using the term "Untermensch," this time in connection with anti-Soviet propaganda, is another brochure, again titled "Der Untermensch", edited by Himmler and distributed by the Race and Settlement Head Office. Published in 1942 after the start of Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
, it is around fifty pages long and consists for the most part of photos casting an extremely negative light on the enemy (see link below for the title page). 3,860,995 copies were printed in the German language. It was also translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Czech and seven other languages. The pamphlet states the following:
Historian Robert Jan van Pelt
Robert Jan van Pelt
Robert Jan van Pelt is an author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto in Ontario and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topics, through which he has come to address...
writes that for the Nazis, "it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch, which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of Judeo-Bolshevism."
This concept included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), non-Europeans (although the number of black Africans, for example, was too small in 1940s Europe) and some of the Slavic peoples (named as Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Serbs and Czechoslovaks).
However, the "Untermensch" policy toward Slavic peoples was far from consistent. The Jasenovac
Jasenovac
Jasenovac is a village and a municipality in Croatian Slavonia, in the southern part of the Sisak-Moslavina county at the confluence of the river Una into Sava.The name means "ash tree" or "ash forest" in Croatian, the area being ringed by such a forest....
concentration camp in Croatia, operated by Croatian fascists called Ustase
Ustaše
The Ustaša - Croatian Revolutionary Movement was a Croatian fascist anti-Yugoslav separatist movement. The ideology of the movement was a blend of fascism, Nazism, and Croatian nationalism. The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span to the River Drina and to the border...
, for example, exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs alongside tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies and a few thousand Croat political dissidents. However, as close relatives of Serbs, the Slavic Croats not only formed units within the SS and other German battalions, but were a part of the Axis alliance. In effect, Hitler's intent was to cull the numbers of Slavic peoples, who both then and now were the most numerous of the European peoples. The "Untermensch" policy made the execution of such policy more effective, by purporting "quasi-scientific
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
" impetus, so such inconsistent application of the policy was logical, as the Nazis did not seek complete destruction of the Slavic peoples, whom they saw as a valuable source of expansion for the post-war Reich.
Nazi anthropologists attempted to scientifically prove the inherent 'inferiority' of the Slavs. However, they were forced to gloss over their findings which consistently found that Early Slavs
Early Slavs
The early Slavs were a diverse group of tribal societies in Migration period and early medieval Europe whose tribal organizations indirectly created the foundations for today’s Slavic nations .The first mention of the name Slavs dates to the 6th century, by which time the Slavic tribes inhabited a...
were dolicocephalic and fair haired, i.e. "Nordic", not to mention the large proportion of Slavic ancestry in Hitler's native Austria. The concept of the Slavic people being "Untermensch" in particular served the Nazis as justification for their genocidal
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
policies and especially their aggression against Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in order to conquer Lebensraum
Lebensraum
was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany...
, particularly in Ukraine. Early plans of the German Reich (summarized as Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing to be undertaken in the Eastern European territories occupied by Germany during World War II...
) envisaged the displacement, enslavement, and elimination of no less than 50 million people who were not considered fit for Germanization from territories it wanted to conquer in Eastern Europe, Ukraine's "chornozem" (black earth) soil being a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the "Herrenvolk". See also Genocides in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
See also
- Übermensch
- Nuremberg LawsNuremberg LawsThe Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
- Racial hygieneRacial hygieneRacial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable...
- EugenicsEugenicsEugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
- Nazi crimes against ethnic PolesNazi crimes against ethnic PolesIn addition to about 2.9 million Polish Jews , about 2.8 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war...
External links
- Der Untermensch propagandaPropagandaPropaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
poster published by the SSSchutzstaffelThe Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
. - Hitler's plans for Eastern Europe
- "Die Drohung des Untermenschen" This is an example of the term "Untermensch" being used in the context of the Nazi eugenicsNazi eugenicsNazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns...
programme. The table suggests that "inferior" people (unmarried and married criminals, parents whose children have learning disabilities) have more children than "superior" people (ordinary Germans, academics). Note that the heading is the subtitle of the German version of Lothrop StoddardLothrop StoddardTheodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, journalist, racial anthropologist, eugenicist, political theorist and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are cited by historians as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.- Biography :Stoddard was...
's book. - Der Untermensch: the Nazi pamphlet