Background: My mother’s grandmother was Jewish, and my father’s grandmother was Gypsy.
Last night, my wife and I watched part of a documentary on the death camps (Auschwitz, specifically.) At the end of the program, she turned to me and asked, “Would that have been you?”
What criteria did the Nazis use to determine racial purity? Is any Gypsy/Jew in me enough to have been sent to the camps?
I think the Nazis went back as far as your great-grandparents. If any of them were Jewish, then you counted as Jewish too. The same rules probably applied to Gypsies, but I’m not sure.
I don’t know, but we noticed the other year that if my friend Moishe had lived during the Nazi regime, he would have gotten six out of seven triangles (he’s a ‘mentally ill’ gay ex-Jewish Gypsy with odd political views who has committed a crime.) He jokes that they would have spent the whole war sewing triangles on him and they never would have got around to killing him.
I don’t really want to look at this codification of evil much longer, so I’m going to cut my observations short.
It states that the “Reich Citizenship Act” defined a person as “Jewish” if they had two grandparents defined as “completely Jewish.”
I can’t tell if this definition was later used as the model for execution. I do notice that it is explicit in excusing those with only one completely Jewish grandparent, as Hitler himself may well have had.
Let’s see:
I’m part Irish/German. HOWEVER, my great grandfather’s name was Salaman. He swore his family wasn’t Jewish, however, he came from the Carpathian mountains, an area that had a large Jewish population, I believe. More importantly, he was one of those filthy Polish. And my other great grandparents on that side (mom’s side), were Hungarian and Slovak. So they were all Magyar/Slavic. Slavs were inferior.
Think they would’ve been there?
(BTW, I’m actually PROUD of the fact that Hitler wouldn’t like my ancestry!)
Pipliner, they would have come for you. Eventually, they would have come after everyone.
The Nazis were also flexible in who they decided to slaughter. There were a lot of non-Jews executed in the concentration camps. If you were tagged as undesirable, they’d find a reason to ship you off.
I just watched a program on TLC last night about a family that lived in a Sewer in Poland for 16 months. It was horrifying. The show said that of 1 million Jewish children in Poland, only 5000 survived the war. 995 out of every thousand children died.
Re: Being flexible: I understand E. Milch, head of Lufthansa at the time of Hitler’s accession to power had a Jewish parent. This would have made him more than Jew enough to be considered undesirable under the Nazi laws. But he liked his job (even after it became a part of the Luftwaffe), and they liked the way he did it. So he was allowed to become the retroactively illegitimate child of an unnamed “Aryan” vice the Jewish parent.
I am sure the Holocaust museum has a copy of the chart the Nazis used to explain the law of who was 99 44/100% pure.
My ancestry would’ve made me safe, but the fact I would’ve be hiding and sneaking the “undesirables” out of danger would’ve gotten me killed anyway
Eventually, they would have come for just about everyone…
Yer pal,
Satan
*I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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David B used me as a cite!*
Also, IIRC, Karl Haushofer (the founder of “geopolitics”) had a full-blooded Jewish wife, but Hitler was so enamored of Haushofer’s philosophy that he declared her an “honorary Aryan”.
Thanks for your input, everyone.
Sofa King, that link was exactly the information I was looking for. Thanks.
Someone on the boards referred to this site. Among other things it shows how the German government informed the public wrt various degrees of “Mischlingen” (mixed Aryan/non-Aryans), and which
marriages were permitted and which were not. The tone of the announcements was almost light, as if they were discussing nothing more serious than traffic regulations.
In light of what it all portended it’s startling to say the least.
I have kind of a nitpick, matt
Is your friend really part Gypsy, or just identifies with the lifestyle traditionally associated with Gypsies/Roma? I just see such possibilities for a really bad sitcom about a gay Canadian dealing with his overprotective Jewish mom and his freewheeling Gypsy dad.
If y’all ever get a chance, check out the novel Stones From The River by Ursula Hegi. The protagonist is a dwarf–a proper Aryan dwarf, but a dwarf nevertheless. Her Aryan heritage protects her, but she knows that the Nazis will eventually come for her because she is “undesirable.” It’s a really interesting story.
Being that I would have been killing as many of them as possible I am quite sure I would have been at the top of their list.
