By the early twentieth century, this term had come to be widely used in a racist context referring to a hypothesized white, blonde and blue-eyed master race (Herrenrasse), culminating with the pogroms of the Nazis in Europe. Subsequently, the term Aryan as a general term for Indo-Europeans has been largely abandoned by scholars (though the term Indo-Aryan is still used to refer to the branch that settled in Southern Asia).