Rassenschande

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Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

Rassenschande[note 1] ("racial shame", "racial defilement", or "racial pollution") or Blutschande ("blood defilement") was the Nazi term for sexual relations between Aryans (cf. Aryan certificate) and non-Aryans, which was punishable by law.[2] Initially, this predominantly referred to relations between Germans and non-Aryans, who were first informally targeted and then systematically, by law; later, relations between Germans and all foreigners, who were brought into the Third Reich as slave workers, were also forbidden relations. Concerted efforts were made to foment popular distaste for it.[3][4]

Implementation

A meeting of the four Nazis who imposed Nazi ideology on the legal system of Germany. From left to right: Roland Freisler, Franz Schlegelburger, Otto Georg Thierack, and Curt Rothenberger.

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.[5] As early as 1924, Julius Streicher argued for the death penalty for Jews found guilty of having sexual relations with Gentiles.[6]

When the Nazis came to 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.[7] 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.[8] Freisler published a pamphlet that called for banning "mixed-blood" sexual intercourse in 1933, regardless of the "foreign blood" involved, which faced strong public criticism and, at the time, no support from Hitler.[9] 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.[10]

Local officials, however, were already requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry.[11] 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.[12] Even before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, the SS regularly arrested those accused of racial defilement and paraded them through the streets with placards around their necks detailing their crime.[13] Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples.[11] One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaved and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew."[14] Placards were widely used to humiliate.[15] Das Schwarze Korps, in its April 1935 issue, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in.[12] 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 besieged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody.[14]

Nuremberg Laws

In 1935, sexual relations and marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans was criminalized under the Nuremberg Laws in conformity with the new racial policy of Nazi Germany.[note 2] Although the laws at first were primarily against Jews, they were later extended to the "Gypsies, Negroes or their bastard offspring".[17][18] Persons accused of racial defilement were publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets with placards around their necks proclaiming their crime.,[19] those convicted were sentenced to a period of time in a concentration camp.[2] As the laws themselves did not permit the death penalty for those charged with racial defilement, the jurisdiction bypassed this and summoned special courts to allow the death penalty for such cases.[20]

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.[21]

Germans who had intermarried with Jews and other non-Aryans prior to the Nuremberg Laws did not have their unions nullified, but were targeted and encouraged to divorce their existing partners.[22]

Rape of Jewish women during World War II was also forbidden, though it did little to stop the soldiers who often killed the woman afterwards, to ensure silence.[23] 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.[24]

Foreign workers

After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans).[1] Himmler issued a decree on 7 December 1942 which stated that any "unauthorized sexual intercourse" would result in the death penalty.[25] The Gestapo heavily persecuted any sexual relations between Germans and the peoples of Eastern Europe on the grounds of the "risk for the racial integrity of the German nation".[1] A further decree was issued that called for applying the death penalty not only to slave laborer persons in the east who had sexual relations with Germans but also to slave laborers of Western origin, such as French, Belgian or British offenders.[25]

After the invasion of Poland, reports of sexual relations between Polish women and German soldiers brought about a directive to the press to promulgate that links between Poles and Germans brought about a decline in German blood, and that any connection with Polish extraction was dangerous, and to describe Poles as on the same level as Jews and Gypsies in order to discourage association.[26] The Nazi German government on 8 March 1940 issued the Polish decrees with regard to the Polish forced laborer workers in Germany, one of the obligations was that any sexual relations between Germans and Poles would result in the latter being punished by the death penalty.[27]

During the war, German women who had sexual relations with foreign workers were publicly humiliated by being marched through the streets with her head shaven and a placard around her neck detailing her crime.[28] In September 1940, Dora von Calbitz, who was found guilty of having sexual relations with a Pole, had her head shaved and was placed in the pillory of her town of Oschatz near Leipzig, with a placard that proclaimed: "I have been a dishonourable German woman in that I sought and had relations with Poles. By doing that I excluded myself from the community of the people."[29] In March 1941 a married German woman who had an affair with a French prisoner of war had her head shaved and was marched through the town of Bramberg in Lower Franconia carrying a sign which said, "I have sullied the honour of the German woman."[30]

During the war, effort was made by Nazi propaganda to Germans to propagate Volkstum ("racial consciousness"). Pamphlets were issued encouraging German women to prevent sexual relations with foreign workers brought to Germany and to view them as a danger to their "blood" (i.e. racial purity).[31] Particularly with the OST-Arbeiters, all sexual relations, even those that did not result in pregnancy, were severely punished.[32] To prevent violations of German racial laws, orders explicitly provided that the workers were to be recruited in equal numbers of men and women, so brothels would not be needed.[33] The program to import nannies from Eastern Europe, including Poland and Ukraine, would result in their working with German children, and quite possibly sexually exploitation; therefore, such women had to be suitable for Germanisation.[34]

Propaganda

Poster of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer (1935)

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".[35] Even foreign propaganda urged the importance of preventing it with penalties.[36]

Der Stürmer was preoccupied with such cases, with nearly every issue alleging sexual crimes, often in graphic detail, about Jews.[37] After the Nuremberg Laws were propagated, Streicher in four of the first eight articles in 1935 of the Der Stürmer demanded for the death penalty in cases of race defilement.[6] It habitually referred to voluntary relationships as "rape" and "molestation."[38] Fips portrayed, for instance, a despondent 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."[39]

Neues Volk, was a monthly publication of the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy which answered questions about acceptable race relations, other material included promoting the excellence of the Aryan race.[40] 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.[40] 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.[40] 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.[40] An article also enjoined that while foreign workers were welcome, all sexual relations were out of the question.[40]

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 Russian;[41] her murder for this is presented as in accordance with ancient Germanic custom for "race pollution."[42] 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 committed suicide in the source.[43] 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.[44] 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.[45]

Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volksturm, racial consciousness, to prevent sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers.[32] Pamphlets enjoined all German women to avoid sexual intercourse with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.[31]

In schools

Implementation 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.[46] 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.[46]

By the mid-1930s, more substantial materials were produced, including many pamphlets such as Can You Think Racially?.[47]

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.[48]

"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."[49] 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."[49] The League of German Girls was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid racial defilement.[49] The pamphlet further claimed that Jews avoided such racial mixing, but preached to other nations to weaken them.[49]

Sentences

According to an article in Der Spiegel, between 1936 and 1943 the Nazis accused 1,580 persons of race defilement with 429 of them being convicted.[50]

Punishment for race defilement for men was the death penalty and for women it was being sent to a concentration camp. When Himmler asked Hitler what the punishment of women found guilty of race defilement should be, Hitler said "having her hair shorn and being sent to a concentration camp".[51]

Notes

  1. ↑ The term used to describe sexual relations between a German and an "alien" (a non-German).[1]
  2. ↑ The term sexual intercourse was extended way beyond the defined concept of the term. Simply looking at someone in a sexual manner was enough to be charged with race defilement.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Diemut Majer (2003). "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939-1945. JHU Press. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-8018-6493-3.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p 125, ISBN 0-691-04649-2
  3. ↑ Ulrich Herbert (1997). Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47000-1.
  4. ↑ Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, p.180
  5. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 25 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Randall L. Bytwerk (1 January 2001). Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-8154-1156-7.
  7. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 171 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  8. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 173-4 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  9. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 174 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  10. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 175-6 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 177 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p. 181 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  13. ↑ Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, p.134
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p 281, ISBN 0-03-076435-1
  15. ↑ Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: Good And Evil In World War II, p 22 ISBN 978-0-06-058097-1
  16. ↑ Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, p.229
  17. ↑ S. H. Milton (2001). ""Gypsies" as social outsiders in Nazi Germany". In Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus. Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. pp. 216, 231. ISBN 9780691086842.
  18. ↑ Michael Burleigh (7 November 1991). The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-521-39802-2.
  19. ↑ Richard J. Evans (2006). The Third Reich in Power. Penguin Books. p. 540. ISBN 978-0-14-100976-6.
  20. ↑ Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, p.331-332
  21. ↑ Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany p 11 ISBN 0-393-03904-8
  22. ↑ Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany p xxvi-ii ISBN 0-393-03904-8
  23. ↑ Jan Fleischhauer, "Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers", 04/08/2011, Der Spiegel
  24. ↑ Numer: 17/18/2007 Wprost "Seksualne Niewolnice III Rzeszy"
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, p.369
  26. ↑ Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy, p58 ISBN 978-0-674-02738-1
  27. ↑ Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, p.155
  28. ↑ Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945, p.224
  29. ↑ The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945, p.236-237
  30. ↑ The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945, p.238-239
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War, p 125, ISBN 0-691-04649-2
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won p139 ISBN 0-349-11679-2
  33. ↑ Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p 399 ISBN 0-679-77663-X
  34. ↑ Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p255, ISBN 0-679-77663-X
  35. ↑ "Advice for Nazi Speakers on the Jews (August 1935)"
  36. ↑ "The “Decent” Jew"
  37. ↑ "The End"
  38. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 233 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  39. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 229 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 40.2 40.3 40.4 "Neues Volk"
  41. ↑ Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema p40 ISBN 0-02-570230-0
  42. ↑ Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p 384, ISBN 0-03-076435-1
  43. ↑ Anthony Rhodes, Propaganda: The art of persuasion: World War II, p20 1976, Chelsea House Publishers, New York
  44. ↑ Jay W. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, p 7 ISBN 0-8166-0741-9
  45. ↑ Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p84-6 ISBN 0-9627613-1-1
  46. ↑ 46.0 46.1 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 137 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  47. ↑ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 139 ISBN 0-674-01172-4
  48. ↑ "Nazi anti-Semitic Catechism"
  49. ↑ 49.0 49.1 49.2 49.3 "The Jewish Question in Education"
  50. ↑ Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich, p.825
  51. ↑ Peter Longerich (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. Oxford University Press. p. 475. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.