Apart from public health concerns, the Nazis were heavily influenced by ideology; specifically, the movement was influenced by concepts of racial hygiene and bodily purity. Nazi leaders believed that it was wrong for the master race to smoke and that tobacco consumption was equal to "racial degeneracy". The Nazis viewed tobacco as a "genetic poison". Racial hygienists opposed tobacco use, fearing that it would "corrupt" the "German germ plasm". Nazi anti-tobacco activists often tried to depict tobacco as a "vice" of the "degenerate" Africans.