Stoddard does not explicitly say this, but he critically refers to the "superman" idea at the end of his book (p. 262). It is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an opposite of Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch (superman) concept.
The leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard was Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability which is imposed by the social order in which he lives". Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, into English, Untermensch is usually translated as " subhuman". The German word Untermensch had been used in earlier periods, but it had not been used in a racial sense, for example, it was used in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. An Austro-Hungarian propaganda poster made during World War I which features the rhyming slogan "Serbia must die!" Such images were representative of the social attitudes underlying the concept of untermensch.
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