I had a thought the other day. If you’re an oppressed minority, perpetually subject to discrimination, and you look the same as the people oppressing you, there’s an obvious thing to try.
Just convert to the dominant culture, and teach your children it’s mannerisms. Marry off your children into the dominant culture’s families. In a generation or 2, nobody will know the difference.
This is the fundamental “problem” black people face with discrimination, which other persecuted “white” minorities don’t face. There used to be heavy discrimination against Irish and Italian and other white people immigrants, right, but that’s mostly gone now. Not because those people all died or people stopped discriminating, but because nobody can tell “their” children apart from the dominant group, and thus nobody can discriminate.
Anyways, it occurred to me that probably many “Jewish” families did exactly this. And some of their distance decedents were probably drafted and served as concentration camp guards.
Secular people of Jewish heritage who had intermarried with non-Jewish Germans and thought they were fully integrated into German society were also murdered.
Obvious differences in appearance have very little to do with it. Christians murdered Muslims in what used to be Yugoslavia. Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants murdered each other.
In addition, being required to abandon your identity, for those who don’t want to, as a condition for not being murdered is generally considered an entirely unreasonable violation of human rights. To convert themselves and their children to the dominant culture comes across to many people as a matter of ‘just stop being you’; especially when they feel that their own culture is the preferable one – which is made rather more likely when the dominant culture is discriminatory, because that’s at least one thing seriously wrong with it in itself. Some people do make that choice; but it’s not remotely a reasonable thing to expect, and it’s never a thing that the word “just”, in the sense that you use it, applies to.
When the dominant culture is accepting rather than discriminatory (as the German culture, relatively speaking, had been to Jews for some time before the leadup to the Holocaust), people are actually more likely to assimilate.
Many Jews in German considered themselves ‘German’, completely assimilated. Many were the descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity generations ago. Both groups felt generally safe, especially the latter.
Then, in 1935 and 1936 came the Nuremberg Laws and it didn’t matter what you considered yourself - what mattered was where you fit in to the racial classification.
In any case, yes, obviously some ‘pure’ Germans must have been descendants of Jews who had converted long ago. But that seems utterly irrelevant to the greater truth.
As an aside, I believe that over the last fifty years or so, the massive immigration of non-Caucasians to erstwhile bastions of whiteness such as Western Europe and Canada has caused Jews to no longer be the default ‘other’. Before brown faces were common, the relatively-readily-identifiable (and hence blamable) Jew was easily also identified as a ‘dirty Jew’. Nowadays, those looking to blame others for their misfortune can pick among many other ‘dirtys’ - from the subcontinent, Africa, southeast Asia, wherever. The current resurgence of European antisemitism is an anomaly, and in my opinion is due almost exclusively to the unfortunate conflation of Jews as a group with Israel as a country by certain Arabic speaking immigrants who’ve arrived there.
“Jews” as opposed to Jews? Hundreds of thousands of people murdered were Germans, not distant relatives. Anyway, it’s not an “accurate model of what happened”, since when the dominant culture is Nazis, the Nazis pretty much know who are the undesirable Untermenschen they want to get rid of (i.e., murder, not “discriminate”), so adopting Nazi “mannerisms” will not get you very far.
He was born in a well-respected, thoroughly socially integrated family, in a time and place where that was documented and well accepted. He worked as a scientist for his native Germany, and was hated by the French and British for the help he gave Germany in World War I. And that all meant nothing to the doctrine of National Socialism.
This is such a confusing and strangely-written OP I barely know how to begin to answer any of the questions it seems to pose.
The Nazis had very specific laws about who was considered Jewish and who wasn’t, based on your ancestry and the ethnicity of your grandparents. Here is a chart of how they determined whether someone was a full Jew, a partial Jew (Mischling) or a full German. It went back to the generations of your grandparents, apparently. Depending on whether you had one or two Jewish grandparents you were either a second or first degree Mischling. The wikipedia article on Mischling seems to indicate that many such people essentially got a pass and were not persecuted, indeed a lot of them appear to have actively participated in the Nazi regime.
Based on this I have to assume that Germans with Jewish ancestry further back than their grandparents, i.e. more than two generations, were probably not persecuted at all, if anyone (including themselves) were even aware of this ancestry.
Note that this only applied within Germany. In other countries invaded by the Nazis, they didn’t care whether you were partially Jewish, fully Jewish, or really even whether you were Jewish at all…if they wanted you gone, for whatever reason, you were gone.
And, prospective SS members had to have documentation of no jüdisches Blut in the family for 150 years. And don’t forget the Ahnenpass could be your friend.
As I recall from assorted museum visits and TV documentaries, Nazi propaganda had always stated as a basic article of faith that Jews could not be considered German citizens (it’s in the early posters from 1920 or so, on display in the NS Documentation Centre in Munich). A film like “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”, released in 1940) held up assimilated Jews in the professions and in high society as examples of a sneaky conspiracy to undermine German culture, since “underneath” all Jews (assimilated urban professionals, casual labourers living in squalif poverty, rural Polish peasant farmers and devout Talmudic scholars alike) were no different (according to the Nazis) from rats.
A and B marry and have kid K.
B and C latter marry and have kid L.
A was considered full Jewish by the Nazis, B and C aren’t. So K goes to the camps while L doesn’t.
I don’t see how a half-sibling can be considered a “distant” relative. K could have been a lifelong Catholic and never stepped into a Synagogue. That didn’t matter.
People are people. They get attracted to someone, get married, have kids. Groupings by bigots has no relation to reality.
Let’s refrain from personal attacks in General Questions. If you want to accuse the OP of antisemitism, take it to the Pit. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
The quotes are because calling people who are the same as nearby people a specific name just because they thump a specific edition of a bible seems rather arbitrary, actually.
It’s arbitrary to divide people into groups based on any criteria, including whether they’re thumping a different version of the Bible, or something other than a bible, or their place or date of birth, language, accent, religion, dietary choices, skin-color, appearance, sexual preference, gender, or anything else.
Using this criterion, words like “American,” “white,” “Christian,” “English-speaking,” “native-born,” “citizen,” “man,” “heterosexual,” “adult,” etc., should always be presented in scare quotes.
As an interesting aside, the English were divided by class, not race. And the one thing the English really hated was people copying their mannerisms, or trying to marry out of their class.
