Uh…is this a joke, or is this poe’s law?
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Colibri
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It’s obviously a joke.
But it’s on the line of plausibiilty. I’ve wondered about Bob Barr myself.
Now, what about the “homosexuals”?
Or the “disabled”? Or “mentally ill”?
Oh, and don’t forget the “Roma”!
Well, since that’s not how someone is determined to be a Jew, your parsing is irrelevant.
The Nazis believed in racial purity. Pure Aryans would make Germany superior.
I certainly don’t think that way.
Sadly the desire for racial purity made assimilated Jews and their descendants priority targets.
It was a catch twenty-two. Unassimilated Jews in Eastern Europe suffered the pogroms because they stood out and were easy targets of hate.
So, many Jews assimilated in Germany, served in the military, owned businesses and were relatively safe until Hitler came to power.
I was fortunate to take a class on the Holocaust taught by a professor whose family escaped just before the visas ended. Some of his extended family died in the camps
The point to make is that we look at these things from the viewpoint of very mobile, very anonymous 20th/21st century North America. It doesn’t work that way in places where people have lived in the same place for 1000 years. Regions have accents (there is no one “British” accent, for example.) You would have to try very hard to disguise where you came from when you moved to say, Munich or Vienna. Those societies were very closed - there were papers required for all sorts of things, it wasn’t like America where the authorities tended to leave you alone. Before most people had automobiles, any neighbourhood was a small gossip factory - you couldn’t do much without all the housewives and old biddies knowing all about you. You shopped locally, your landlord was local, your job was local or known about, your medical problems, where you go to church or not, etc. (It’s a modern North American conceit to live in an apartment tower and never know your neighbours). Religion was an important part of life - neighbours noted where you did or did not go to church. The government knew about your birth certificate and listed your parentage. You couldn’t just move to a new neighbourhood, call yourself Franz Schmidt, and carry on. Plus, it’s a small world after all - you were at risk to encounter someone from near your old (or alleged) home town who would know whether your back story was true…
Consider that even in Amsterdam, someone told the Gestapo about Ann Frank’s family, despite their efforts to hide. I suspect someone notice collecting food for half a dozen people, or noises at night, or something. nothing’s a secret in a crowded neighbourhood.
The moral of the story was that most of the time, until 1933 most people could not be bothered making the extreme effort to fully disguise their identity, and after that it was too late; there were too many controls in place and people looking for anyone tryig to create false identities.
Plus, as for assimilation - while I’m sure there were instances of intermarriage, the general feeling was that people “stuck with their own group”.
On the other hand, there’s the rumors that Hitler himself had a Jewish grandparent, and nobody cared. The moral of which story is that Nazis aren’t particularly concerned about logic or consistency.
According to my ex (who, while he got his degree in history, is not a truly reliable source of information) Germany conducted censuses in the time period before the Holocaust that asked if your parents, grandparents or (IIRC) great-grandparents were Jewish.
So, no matter how lily white you were, if you or any of your relatives answered “yes”, you were targeted for the concentration camps.
If anyone has better sources to verify or refute this, I would appreciate it.
I assume they had several decades of census data, plus birth records. Europe was a hive of bureaucracy. Among the details on your identity papers would be your religious affiliation. (As I understand it, there is still this sort of thing today, to determine whether your taxes support catholic or protestant schools?)
The only real question is how much effort they put into digging into mounds of paper data and correlating things, in the days before computers.
Another good one is Edith Stein. She was a Catholic Nun–she was baptized in 1922 and took Holy Orders in 1933. She was killed at Auschwitz (and later canonized).
This seems rather unreliable. Also, by modern standards almost every citizen of Germany was ‘white’.
What the fuck do modern standards have to do with 1930s Germany?
People don’t, when it comes down to it, really care what the “reason” is or even whether it makes any kind of sense. Give them somebody to hate, someone to scapegoat, someone to lynch, a significant percentage of the population will buy into whatever “justification” the rabble rousers dream up. They don’t actually care. Jews? Socialists? Homosexuals? Whatever, give them an “other” to attack and they’ll jump to it and thank you for the opportunity.
I’m 1/4 Ashkenazi Jew. I’m 3/4 Scottish & Irish. Nazis would murder me for my “Jew blood” if they could. There are people in my own country who would gladly murder me for my grandfather’s ethnicity.
Neighbours? Work colleagues? Distant relatives? Doesn’t matter. Give the people a scapegoat and they’ll thank you for it.
Don’t try to make sense of it. It’s not about making sense. It’s not about logic, it’s not about even being a consistent viewpoint. It’s just hatred. Haters want to hate. Victimisers want victims. That’s all it is. Bloodlust.
Haber the Jewish wannabee Prussian, who developed the gases used in WW1 and died of natural causes shortly after Hitler came to power. Some of his relatives were gassed, because they were Jewish. Talk about ungrateful. Or ironic.
There were rumors that Hitler’s daddy was not Alois, but a Jewish businessman. However, there is no proof that his mum even met the guy. Hitler went to great efforts to conceal his past, but probably because of concerns that his family tree didn’t branch at certain points, just like the hillbillies.
Several leading Nazis were suspected of being Jewish, such as Heydrich, and some such as Erhard Milch had to be aryanized in a rather contrived way. Logic? Not a strong feature of Nazism.
Yup, entirely true. One Jewish grandparent was not enough enough to get you in trouble, although arguably that could have changed over time once Germany no longer a war to worry about.
Someone said that the Jews were identifiable. Mostly, no, they often looked just like the non-Jewish Germans. There were of course names that indicated probable Jewish origin. The problem in Germany was that all the citizens were registered somewhere, but again, in the chaos of war some could slip away and move to another town, claiming they had been bombed out.