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Mischling

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This photo of Mischling Werner Goldberg, who was blond and blue-eyed, was used by the Berliner Tageblatt for its title page. Its caption read "The Ideal German Soldier."

Mischling ("crossbreed" in German) was the German term used during the Third Reich to denote persons deemed to have partial Jewish ancestry.[1] The word has essentially the same origin as Mestee in English, mestizo in Spanish and métis in French, and literally means "mixed person."

Contents

[edit] Nuremberg laws

As defined by the Nazi Nuremberg laws in 1935, a Jew was a person who had at least three Jewish grandparents, regardless of religious affiliation or self-identification. A person with two full Jewish (German: Volljuden) grandparents was also legally "Jewish" (so-called Geltungsjude, about in English: Jew by legal validity) if either (a) he or she practiced the Jewish religion or (b) he or she was married to a Jew or (c) he or she had a Jewish parent, including cases where (d) he or she was illegitimate. People who did not belong to these 4 categorical conditions but who had two Jewish grandparents were Mischling of the first degree. Someone with only one Jewish grandparent was Mischling of the second degree.[2] See Mischling Test.

[edit] Jewish identity

Helmut Schmidt

Soon after passage of the Enabling Act of 1933, the Nazi government promulgated several anti-Jewish statutes, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service on 7 April 1933. Using this law, the regime aimed to dismiss all "non-Aryans" from all government positions in society, including public educators and those practicing medicine in state hospitals. As a result, the term "non-Aryan"[3] had to be defined in a way compatible with Nazi ideology. Four days after the passing of this act, under the so-called "First Racial Definition" supplementary decree of 11 April that was issued to clarify portions of the 7 April law, a "non-Aryan" (i.e. a Jew) was defined as one who had at least one Jewish parent or grandparent.[4] It is important to observe that the Nazis attempted to define Jewish identity genetically, although as a practical type of "proof" religious records (especially christening records) were frequently used. In such a mentality ethnic Jews who converted to Christendom could be regarded as especially deceitful and subversive. Gentiles who had converted to Judaism were perceived essentially as traitors to the "Aryan race" and were among the first to be persecuted and killed.

[edit] Standards of the SS

The SS used a more stringent standard: In order to join, a candidate had to prove (presumably, through baptismal records) that all direct ancestors born since 1750 were not Jewish, or they could apply for a German Blood Certificate.

[edit] Mischlings often Protestant

In the 19th century many German Jews converted to Christianity, most of them becoming Protestants rather than Roman Catholics.[5] Two thirds of the German population were Protestant. Protestants comprised a plurality in the nation as a whole until 1938, when the Anschluß annexing Austria rendered Germany a Roman Catholic majority, which subsequently increased with the incorporation of largely Roman Catholic Sudeten Germans. About 80% of the Gentile Germans persecuted as Jews according to the Nuremberg Laws were affiliated with one of the 28 Protestants church bodies.[6] In 1933 approximately 77% of German Gentiles with Jewish ancestry were Protestant, the percentage dropped to 66% in the 1939 census, after the annexations of 1938.[7] Converts to Christianity and their descendants often married Christians with no recent Jewish ancestry. As a result - by the time the Nazis came to power - many Protestants and Roman Catholics in Germany had some traceable Jewish ancestry (usually traced back by the Nazi authorities for two generations), so that a majority of 1st- or 2nd-degree Mischlinge was Protestant, many Catholics. A considerable number of German Gentiles with Jewish ancestry were irreligionists. Lutherans with Jewish ancestry were largely in northwestern Germany, Evangelical Protestants of Jewish descent in central Germany (Berlin and its environs) and the country's east. Catholics with Jewish ancestry lived mostly in western and southern Germany.

[edit] Reclassification procedure

Requests for reclassification (e.g., Jew as Mischling 1st degree, 1st degree as 2nd degree) or Aryanization (see German Blood Certificate) were personally reviewed by Adolf Hitler himself. Apparently, he considered the issue important enough to him that he found time to review a few thousand such files. The extent of assimilation of ethnic Jews into their Gentile (and Christian) surroundings was a factor much more complicated than the Nazis anticipated; widespread corruption and lack of any ethical moorings among many Nazi leaders frequently gave way to bribery, extortion, and other subterfuges over documentation of who was or was not a Jew.

[edit] Comparison with Jewish law

Erhard Milch (at right)

All streams in Judaism agree that there are two routes to Jewishness: ancestry and conversion.

Regarding ancestry, Orthodox and Conservative Judaism consider the offspring of a Jewish mother to be Jewish (matrilineal descent): the ancestry of the father is irrelevant. In the postwar era, Reform Judaism adopted the innovation of patrilineal, or bilineal descent: a person with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother may also be considered Jewish if (s)he identifies as such.

Karaite Judaism, including only the Tanakh in its canon, traces Jewishness exclusively through the father's line, (patrilineal descent). As was most likely the case in ancient Israel.

Regarding conversion, the various streams of Judaism apply different levels of stringency with respect to the prospective convert's level of observance and commitment, but all agree that the ancestry of the convert is irrelevant. People of all parentage and backgrounds have joined and continue to join the Jewish religion.

The modern State of Israel allows anyone who does not practice a religion other than Judaism to settle in Israel as a beneficiary of the Law of Return, provided that the person has one Jewish grandparent, a Jewish spouse, or that the person is a valid convert to Judaism.

Finally, a person of Jewish ancestry who converted to another religion is still considered Jewish in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, whereas Reform Judaism and the State of Israel consider such people not to be Jewish.

[edit] Numbers of people considered Mischlinge

According to the 1939 Reich census, there were about 72,000 Mischlings of the 1st degree, some 39,000 of the 2nd degree, and tens of thousands more of higher degrees.[8]

According to historian and Israeli Army and U.S. Marine veteran Bryan Mark Rigg, up to 160 thousands of one-quarter, one-half, and even full Jewish men served in the German armed forces during World War II, including several generals and at least one field marshal.[9]

[edit] Prominent Mischlinge

Some examples of Mischlinge:

[edit] Fate during the nazi era

[edit] Recruitment into the Organisation Todt

Beginning autumn of 1944, between 10,000 to 20,000 half-Jews (Mischlinge) and persons related to Jews by marriage were recruited into special units or the Organisation Todt[12].

[edit] German usage

In German, the word has the general meaning of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed.[13] It is no longer used to designate persons of partial Jewish ancestry.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Reference Works

  • Baumel, Judith Tydor (2001). The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300084323 (Holocaust Encyclopedia). 

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The term did not originate in Nazi Germany. It arose in botany and zoology as meaning "hybrid" or "mongrel" before being applied to human beings in the mid-nineteenth century. From inception, it carried connotations of inferiority and degeneracy. In the Third Reich, it developed into an official legal term with a fixed and defined meaning set out by regulation. Holocaust Encyclopedia p. 420-25. See also article on Eugen Fischer.
  2. ^ R. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 150ff.
  3. ^ The rather awkward term was a circumlocution for "Jew" (German: Jude) and was used in legal parlance until the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. See Mischling Test.
  4. ^ See Mischling Test article for more detail.
  5. ^ The choice was often based on the dominant form of Christendom in the area of Germany where the converts lived. According to the census in 1933 there were in Germany, with an overall population of 62 millions, 41 million parishioners enlisted with one of the 28 different Lutheran, Reformed and United Protestant church bodies, making up 62,7% as against 21,1 million Catholics (32,5%). The biggest of them, the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union comprised 18 million enlisted parishioners. Noteworthy families of Jewish descent, who converted to Lutheran Protestantism included those of Karl Marx and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The borders of Germany changed several times between the Napoleonic era and the rise of the Third Reich. Areas at times under French or Polish political or cultural dominance were overwhelmingly Catholic in religion within the Gentile community.
  6. ^ ›Büro Pfarrer Grüber‹ Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte. Geschichte und Wirken heute, edited by the Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte (English: Evangelical Centre to Help the formerly Racially Persecuted), Berlin: no publ., 1988, p. 8. No ISBN.
  7. ^ Ursula Büttner, "Von der Kirche verlassen: Die deutschen Protestanten und die Verfolgung der Juden und Christen jüdischer Herkunft im »Dritten Reich«", In: Die verlassenen Kinder der Kirche: Der Umgang mit Christen jüdischer Herkunft im »Dritten Reich«, Ursula Büttner and Martin Greschat (eds.), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998, pp. 15-69, here footnote 20 on pp. 20seq. ISBN 3-525-01620-4.
  8. ^ D. Bankier, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 3, Number 1 (1988), pp. 1-20.
  9. ^ Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story Of Nazi Racial Laws And Men Of Jewish Descent In The German Military (Modern War Studies) (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), ISBN 0700613587 (see also "External links"). On p. 300 Rigg discusses Jewish conversion to Roman Catholicism and to Lutheranism but does not offer a deduction on which of those two largest religious orientations among Germans was more likely to attract the Jewish converts.
  10. ^ Rigg, 2004, p. 217. Johannes Zukertort was the Wehrmacht's senior artillery officer at the Battle of Savastopol.
  11. ^ Rigg, 2004, pp. 206, 216-217.
  12. ^ Wolf Gruner (2006). Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944. Institute of Contemporary History, Munich and Berlin. New York: Cambridge University Press. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 9780521838757
  13. ^ Messinger, Heinz. Langenscheidts Handwörterbuch Englisch. Teil II Deutsch-English. Langenscheidt, 1959
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