Rudolf Steiner and Hitler were contemporaries - Steiner's life was at an end as Hitler was coming to power. Both Steiner (directly) and Hitler (indirectly) drew their racist ideas from the same source - Helena P. Blavatsky. Steiner's and Hitler's ideas can indeed sound indistinguishable - especially when taken out of context. Nonetheless, Steiner was no Hitler - nor did he want to be. He just had ridiculous ideas about the races.
To understand what Steiner believed, one need only read Steiner's words AND apply them to the overall context of Anthroposophy. It doesn't do any good to take Steiner out of context. Steiner structured Anthroposophy around the themes of reincarnation and karma. With regard to racism, what he believed is that the "individual" is a spirit (not a incarnate human being) and that the individual incarnates into an appropriate body for an experience on earth. The body is unimportant - OTHER THAN it serves as an indicator of the person's place on the ladder of spiritual advancement... people with white skin being the highest physical form attainable. You are entitled to advance through all the races... and eventually become white. White Anthroposophists don't necessarily look down on people of other races... they're just not as spiritually advanced as white people. Steiner made observations of the races, of course, and assigned intelligence to white people and childishness to black people... among many, many other things.
Now, you may think that this is all stuff of a by-gone era, but that isn't completely true. Steiner's racist ideas are taught to Waldorf teachers in Waldorf teacher training today! Why? Well, obviously, they may have children of all races in their classroom, and since each race has its own characteristics, Waldorf teachers need to know about them - just like they learn about the temperaments, large and small-headed children and other things they believe are important. So each Waldorf teacher has an "impression" of what the spirit of a black, hispanic, asian or native American child is like before they meet them. This is intended to help them with the incarnation and development of the child. They aren't intentionally racist, they simply don't understand that what they are doing is racist.
The worst manifestation of Steiner's racism came to my own consciousness when a Waldorf teacher taught my child something that is *directly* from Steiner. She taught in physiology class that "the blood of people from Europe is more evolved than the blood of people from Africa and Asia". This incredibly thoughtless statement was SUPPORTED by the school administrators when I brought it to their attention. One called it "out of Africa theory". So, it is clear to me, they simply don't understand that Steiner was a racist, and they don't understand that by following and applying his ideas in the classroom, they too are promoting and sometimes even teaching racism - as if it was science.