Rassenschande

Rassenschande ("racial shame", "racial defilement", or "racial pollution") or Blutschande ("blood defilement") was the Nazi term for sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, which was punishable by law.[1] This predominately meant Jews and Germans, who were targetting first informally and then by law, but Eastern Europeans brought as slave workers to Germany were also forbidden such relations. Concerted efforts were made to foment popular distaste for it.

Contents

Implementation

Prior to the Nazi ascension to power, Hitler often blamed moral degradation on rassenschande, or on "bastardization" -- a way to assure his followers of his continuing anti-Semitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption.[2]

When they took power, considerable clashes and infighting had stemmed from conflicting views on what constituted a Jew -- anything from full Jewish background to one-sixteenth part Jewish blood were argued for -- thus complicating the definition of the offense.[3] Some regarded the number of intermarriages as too small to be harmful; such Nazis as Roland Freisler regarded this as irrelevant owing to the "racial treason" involved.[4] Freisler published a pamphlet that called for banning "mixed-blood" intercourse in 1933, regardless of the "foreign blood" involved, which faced strong public criticism and, at the time, no support from Hitler.[5] His superior, Franz Gürtner, opposed it both for reasons of popular support and such problematic issues as people who did not know they had Jewish blood, and that allegations of Jewish blood (true or false) could be used for blackmail.[6]

Local officials, however, were already requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry.[7] In 1934, Wilhelm Frick warned local officials about banning such marriages on their own, but in 1935, authorized them to delay applications by mixed couples.[8] Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples.[7] One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaving and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew."[9] Placards were indeed wide-used to humiliate.[10] Das Schwarze Korps, in its April 1935, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in.[8] It reported a story that a Jew had enticed a seventeen-year-old employee into nude midnight bathing -- the girl being saved from suicide only by the intervention of an SS patrol, and a mob of thousands besiged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody.[9]

In 1935, it was criminalized under the Nuremberg Laws as contrary to the racial policy of Nazi Germany. Germans found guilty could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty.[1]

The extent of the law meant that the police were insufficient to the task of detecting infractions; more than three-fifths of all Gestapo cases were prompted by denunciations.[11]

Germans who had intermarried with Jews did not have their unions nullified by the Nuremberg Laws, but were targeted to encourage divorce.[12]

Rape of Jewish women during World War II was also forbidden; though it did little to stop the soldiers, they often killed the woman afterwards, to ensure silence.[13] In the only case where German soldiers were prosecuted for rape during the military campaign in Poland -- the case of mass rape committed by three soldiers against the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój -- the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande rather than rape.[14]

All foreign workers brought to Germany were treated as a danger to their blood.[15] Particularly with the OST-Arbeiters, all sexual relations, even those that did not result in pregnancy, were severely punished.[16] The program to import nannies from Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Ukraine, would result in their working with German children, and quite possibly sexually exploitation; therefore, such women had to be suitable for Germanisation.[17]

Propaganda

Inculcating acceptance of this distinction, and the need for racial hygiene was widely spread in Nazi propaganda. Nazi speakers were enjoined that many Germans did not "recognize what is at stake", citing a newspaper title that called the decision to punish sexual relations between Germans and Jews "A Strange Decision".[18] Even foreign propaganda urged the importance of preventing it with penalties.[19]

Der Stürmer was preoccupied with such cases, with nearly every issue alleging sexual crimes, often in graphic detail, about Jews.[20] It habitually referred to voluntary relationships as "rape" and "molestation."[21] Fips portrayed, for instance, a despondant mother smoking while neglecting her child in a lonely rooming house, with a picture of her Jewish seducer on the floor, with the caption: "Everything in her has died. She was ruined by a Jew."[22]

Neues Volk, the publication of the Office of Racial Policy, answered questions about acceptable relations.[23] Even an infertile German woman can not marry a Jew as "it offends the honor of the German people" and she should break off the relationship because she is in danger of violating the law.[23] Marriage to a Chinese man, even though the woman is pregnant is likewise forbidden, and the office had seen to it that the man was deported.[23] A Dutch woman raised questions of not only Jewish blood but non-white blood from the colonies, but if they were answered, she would be acceptable.[23] An article also injoined that while foreign workers were welcome, all sexual relations were out of the question.[23]

Film was also used. In Friesennot, a Frisian character objects to a half-Russian, half-Frisian girl having an affair with a Russian, because Frisian blood outweighs German;[24] her murder for this is presented as in accordance with ancient Germanic custom for "race pollution."[25] In Die goldene Stadt, a young, innocent country girl, a Sudeten German, allows a Czech to seduce her; this racial pollution is one reason why she commits suicide, in a deliberate change insisted on by the Propaganda Ministry, since the disgraced daughter should suffer rather than the guiltless father, who commited suicide in the source.[26] In Jud Süß, the title Jew relentlessly pursues a pure Aryan maid; after he succeeds, by having her husband arrested and tortured, and offering to free him for her compliance, she drowns herself.[27] In Die Reise nach Tilsit, the Polish seductress persuades the German husband to murder his virtuous German wife to run off with her, but the husband fails in it and in the end, contrite, returns to his wife.[28]

Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volksturm, racial consciousness, to prevent sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers.[29] Pamphlets enjoined all German women to avoid sexual intercourse with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.[30]

In schools

Implemention began in schools so rapidly that book production could not keep up; the ministry held that no student should graduate "unless he has perceived that the future of a Volk depends on race and inheritance and understood the obligation this places on him," and so urged for teacher courses using mimeographed materials and cheaply produced books.[31] Students were given poems to memorize:

Keep your blood pure,

it is not yours alone,

it comes from far away,

it flows into the distance

laden with thousands of ancestors,

and it holds the entire future!

It is your eternal life.[31]

By the mid-1930s, more substantial materials were produced, including many pamphlets such as Can You Think Racially?.[32]

The German National Catechism, a pamphlet widely used in schools, included among its questions

What is racial defilement?

Forgetting our spirit and our blood. A careless disregard of our nature and a contempt for our blood. No German man may take a Jewish woman as his wife, and no German girl may marry a Jew. Those who do that exclude themselves from the community of the German people.

[33]

"The Jewish Question in Education", a pamphlet for teachers, lamented that many girls and women had been ruined by Jews because no one had warned them of the perils, "no one introduced them to the god-given secrets and laws of blood and race."[34] Such unions could produce children of mixed blood ("a lamentable creature, tossed back and forth by the blood of his two races"), and even when they did not, "the curse also sticks to the defiled mother, never leaving her for the rest of her life. Racial defilement is racial death. Racial defilement is bloodless murder. A woman defiled by the Jew can never rid her body of the foreign poison she has absorbed. She is lost to her people."[34] The League of German Girls was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid racial defilement.[34] The pamphlet further claimed that Jews avoided such racial mixing, but preached to other nations to weaken them.[34]

References

  1. ^ a b Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p 125, ISBN 0691046492
  2. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 25 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  3. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 171 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  4. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 173-4 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  5. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 174 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  6. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 175-6 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  7. ^ a b Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 177 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  8. ^ a b Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p. 181 ISBN 0-674-0117204
  9. ^ a b Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p 281, ISBN 03-076435-1
  10. ^ Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: Good And Evil In World War II, p 22 ISBN 978-0-06-058097-1
  11. ^ Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany p 11 ISBN 0-393-03904-8
  12. ^ Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany p xxvi-ii ISBN 0-393-03904-8
  13. ^ Jan Fleischhauer, "Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers", 04/08/2011, Der Spiegel
  14. ^ Numer: 17/18/2007 Wprost "Seksualne Niewolnice III Rzeszy"
  15. ^ Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p 125, ISBN 0691046492
  16. ^ Robert Edwin Hertzstein, The War That Hitler Won p139 ISBN 399-11845-4
  17. ^ Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p255, ISBN 0-679-77663-X
  18. ^ "Advice for Nazi Speakers on the Jews (August 1935)"
  19. ^ "The “Decent” Jew"
  20. ^ "The End"
  21. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 233 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  22. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 229 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  23. ^ a b c d e "Neues Volk"
  24. ^ Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema p40 ISBN 0-02-570230-0
  25. ^ Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p 384, ISBN 03-076435-1
  26. ^ Anthony Rhodes, Propaganda: The art of persuasion: World War II, p20 1976, Chelsea House Publishers, New York
  27. ^ Jay W. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, p 7 ISBN 0-8166-0741-9
  28. ^ Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p84-6 ISBN 0-9627613-1-1
  29. ^ Robert Edwin Hertzstein, The War That Hitler Won p139 ISBN 399-11845-4
  30. ^ Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p 125, ISBN 0691046492
  31. ^ a b Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 137 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  32. ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 139 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  33. ^ "Nazi anti-Semitic Catechism"
  34. ^ a b c d "The Jewish Question in Education"