Was there ever a situation where full-Nazi, diehard Aryan Germans were mistakenly classified as Jews (or Roma, or gays, or Slavs, or some other death classification) and Auschwitz’d despite their protests that they didn’t have a drop of Jewish blood?
I think it’s certain they must have been. With mass murder the slightest hint of suspicion is enough to get someone sent to the death camps. It isn’t like they carefully examined the evidence on a case by case basis.
There were plenty of people who were classified as Jews by the Nazi regime even though they weren’t really.
Suppose your grandparents had been non-practicing Jews. They had children and these children converted to Catholicism. A son and daughter from these two families met and got married in a regular church wedding. They eventually had you. You were baptized and confirmed and raised as a Catholic from birth.
You would no doubt be shocked when the Nazis took power and informed you that you were a Jew. But according to German law, that’s what you were.
You’re conflating Judaism with having Jewish ancestry. It wasn’t the religion that the Nazis were trying to eradicate through ethnic cleansing and eugenics.
If we’re talking about German citizens - and the OP implies that we are - there was a well-documented legal hierarchy. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was a “full Jew”, as was anyone with two Jewish grandparents if, in addition, they had certain other connections to the Jewish community. Two Jewish grandparents and no such connection, you were a “mischling [hybrid] of the first degree”; one Jewish grandparent and you were a “mischling of the second degree”. Because there were objective rules about these classifications, a citizen could in theory challenge the classification to which they had been assigned, and get it corrected if they could demonstrate that it was wrong. You could also get your classification changed if you were well-connected to senior party figures, and had plenty of money to spend on smoothing the way.
Mischlinge were, I think, not formally liable to deportation, but they were liable to be conscripted into the Todt Organisation, which many did not survive. And of course they were subject to other forms of legal and administrative persecution and victimisation.
If we are looking at non-German Jews in the occupied territories, the Mischlinge system was (crudely) replicated in occupied France, the Low Countries, etc. But not in Poland or further east; any connection at all with the Jewish community marked you as a Jew, with the consequences that that entailed.
The period from 1942 until the end of the war, with approximately 1.4 million labourers in the service of the Organisation Todt. Overall, 1% were Germans rejected from military service and 1.5% were concentration camp prisoners; the rest were prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. All were effectively treated as slaves and existed in the complete and arbitrary service of a totalitarian state. Many did not survive the work or the war. By the end of the war, the Reichsarbeitsdienst service for Germans had been reduced to six weeks of perfunctory military training and all available conscript German manpower diverted to military units and direct military support organisations. From the beginning of 1942 at the latest, their place was increasingly taken by prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. Foreign nationals and POWs were often, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as “foreign workers” (Fremdarbeiter). During 1943 and 1944, these were further augmented by concentration camp and other prisoners. Beginning in the autumn of 1944, between 10,000 and 20,000 half-Jews (Mischlinge) and persons related to Jews by marriage were recruited into special units.
I am not sure if this is a hijack or not, but around 11 million non-jews died in Nazi prisons, forced labor or concentration camps, including some groups also racially targeted, like the Roma.
None of this reduces the magnitude of the horrors committed against the Jewish people. Please don’t misunderstand me.
I am just saying this because it seems to me that many people are unaware that any non-jews died in this way at all.
I think that’s widely-known, Mijin. I don’t recall ever talking to anyone who seemed to be unaware of it.
The question here is a different one; did any non-Jewish Germans die at the hands of the Nazis because they were taken to be Jews?
To answer the OP, almost certainly. But the Germans kept excellent records, as all torturers and mass murders do. (Why? To prove that weren’t doing anything wrong?)
But I’m not sure you really grasp the enormity of the horror. You are asking if anybody was dragged from their homes, put to death, or worked to death, forced to fight each other like cats in a sack, and when they were dead, and any gold teeth pulled, fed in to ovens, when in fact what? They weren’t Jewish? It was all unjust? It was a mistake? It was supposed to happen to the guy next door? Well sure, that’s an important tip. Always make sure you are the one outside the fence.
Right, I know that, which is why in the OP I also listed that Roma, Slavs, etc. were targeted. I was just asking if there had ever been a bureaucratic or paperwork flub thing that ironically got Hitler-Heiling Nazis sent to the death camps to their dismay.
The Germans wiped out whole villages in the East due to the populations being Jewish. The chances of 100% of the population of these villages actually being Jewish is 0.
These people did not remotely have the opportunity to formally apply for a reclassification.
I vividly recall in Art Spiegelman’s bio-graphic novel Maus (actually the second part, IIRC) about his father’s experiences as a German-educated Polish Jew surviving the Holocaust, that he describes a prisoner who constantly insisted to the guards that he was “a German, like you, I don’t being here with these yids, my son is in the Army now, and I have a medal from the Kaiser!” The guards DNGAF.
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20190723/b264c18f8f57b4899a33b148a93d7970.jpg
At least early in the regime, camps like Dachau were for political prisoners-anyone suspected of being Communist, opposing the regime or its policies, etc. It was only later that they created camps specifically to house and dispose of Jewish (and Roma, and gay) populations. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people got mixed up in the “wrong” group of prisoners.
Yep, my Euro relatives were send to Dachau. Apparently Grand Duke Max helped them, distant relatives or something. But after the war the Soviets sent them again to *their *camps, and they never were heard from again.
One of the horrors of the camps is that after the camps were liberated- the Soviets sent quite a few to their nasty camps. The Allies did nothing about it, either.
But still, quite a few in even the Politcal areas died of disease and privation.
Dachau, the first camp, was opened 13 days after the Nazis took power in Bavaria (51 days after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany). For the first 5 years of it’s operation, it was used for political prisoners, then 1935-1938 gays, immigrants & some religions were added. Only after 1938, in the last 7 years of operation, were large numbers of Jews added.
So prior to that, most of the prisoners would have been full-blooded Germans. Some might have been Jews, but they were not imprisoned for that reason. Nor were they mistaken for Jews.
There are, I think, a few documented cases of people who were Jews successfully escaping by passing themselves off as what the Nazis termed volkdeutsch, so it’s not impossible that the reverse error occurred. But within German itself, and with respect to German citizens, its very unlikely; as already noted, the mischlinge classification system had been in full swing for nearly 10 years before the Nazis started deporting German Jews for extermination, and anybody who had been mistakenly classified as Jewish was highly incentivised to have the error rectified long before they were in any danger of actually being killed on account of the error.
In the occupied territories, particularly to the East, it was a different matter. In Poland and the Soviet Union whole villages were deported and destroyed because they were known to be Jewish villages; everyone in them was killed without regard to whether they themselves were Jewish or not, and people were certainly killed who were only there because they happened to be visiting on the day the roundup took place. This isn’t necessarily because the Nazis were convinced they were Jewish; just that they were in a group largely composed of Jews, most members of which were probably Jewish and the rest of whom were probably associating, one way or another, with Jews. It was enough.
But if I recall, none of the countries to the east were hotbeds of liberal tolerance. There were Jewish villages and ghettos because socially and legally mixing was discouraged, and I imagine a lot of the identification of Jews was already conveniently done before occupation by the existing authorities on people’s ID papers. Maybe in the big cities some more secular types could mingle or hide, but of course any intellectuals were a target too. The attitude “kill them all and let God sort them out” nevertheless predominated.
Even the USA, France and Britain were fairly antisemitic. Not in round them up and kill them, true, but note we refused that refugee ship.
If you read
*In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin *
by Erik Larson you can also see how much antisemitic feeling there was in the highest levels of the uS government.