Blond Hair
Green and yellow eyes,
Fair skin
Dunno. Def would have kept my mouth shut in public and as lower profile as I could muster.
Hmm. Hard to say. I’m blonde, green eyed, pale skinned and of British and German descent, so I’d have that going for me. It depends on how well I could keep my mouth shut about all the other stuff.
I don’t think of myself as a communist, but I’m pretty friendly with the Marxist group at my university. We chat whenever we run into each other at same-sex marriage and refugee rights protests, I’ve attended a few of their meetings and signed a bunch of their petitions, and I used to subscribe to **Socialist **Alternative newspaper. I am a liberal. Dunno if that’d be enough to get me in trouble. Although if I were in Nazi Germany, I’d either be a hell of a lot more or a hell of a lot less radical, and I honestly don’t know which way I’d go.
I’m queer, but I could stay pretty damn closeted if my life depended on it. Plus, I’m female, and it was mostly men who were sent to camps for homosexuality.
I’m also a pacifist, but again, I’m female and nobody would be trying to conscript me. Like with the liberal thing, it all depends on whether I could keep my mouth shut.
Why would the Nazis kill me? Let me count the ways…
- Jewish grandfather. And I look like him.
- Socialist upbringing. That’s almost… Communist!
- Bad eyesight. This would probably put me under ‘disabled’.
- Esperanto speaker. Like #2, this would put me in the ‘politically untrustworthy’ class, if there wasn’t a separate category.
- Had a Jamaican girlfriend. Race traitor!
- Lotsa depression. Mentally infirm!
I’m a queer, pacifist, ** social democrat**, with a physical disability.
I’d be screwed.
I would probably keep my mouth shut about the first three once the Nazis came to power, but that last is hard to hide, and I would be vocally against them before they started killing people, and, well, I don’t fancy my chances of nobody making note of that and bringing it up later.
I’m dark-haired, but Caucasian – no Jewish blood in the family, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Am apolitical by temperament. Am a coward, and – even without the issue of possibly putting loved ones at risk – would have kept my head down and kept quiet (while inwardly feeling distressed about a lot of what was being done). Think I’d probably not have got into trouble.
Assuming making it through the war – feel that it would have been poetic justice for me to be located at war’s end, in the Soviet occupation zone, later German Democratic Republic. Still – just, however many years or decades more, of behaving in a way for which I’d already had plenty of practice.
Gay. I’m so busted.
Yes but mainly because I am a firm believer of avoidance. My ass would be on the first ship out I could book passage on, I am not so ‘owned’ by my surroundings or belongings that I would not sell everything I couldn’t pack and hit the road.
Descent wise, my Mother’s side of the family come from Altekirchen and were Anabaptists who bailed out of Germany back in the day for religious freedoms found in the US.
Otherwise, I am a trained inside outside mechanic who would be valuable in the war industry though unable to produce children, and I am stuck in a wheelchair or on crutches because of injuries though I am not certain about the German’s ‘rosie the riveters’ programs. As a female I might instead find myself as a secretary somewhere that wheels are not a problem.
On the whole, I would prefer to run.
On the positive side: blue/green eyes, light brown hair (sometimes described as “blond” by people with black hair). Fair skin, tall, thin.
Ethnicity: Scottish Protestant/Irish Catholic… so, not perfect (from a Nazi viewpoint) but acceptable.
BUT: I’m an actual working-class lefty who can’t imagine ever ever accepting a right-wing dictatorship. Current politics is bad enough, actual Nazis would be (and indeed are) my sworn enemies. So, red triangle for me.
Exactly the same here. I’m gay but wouldn’t have come out back then. I’m also not 100% white but nobody would have known and there were no official sanctions against Africans or Indians.
My very blonde, blue-eyed, physically healthy daughter would have been the Nazis’ darling. Unless she started arguing with them, which is a possibility.
When studying WW2 at school (where she’s the only blonde) she got a lot of bizarre hassle for being a Hitler Youth despite being as anti-racist as they come. It was intended to be funny, I think, but I didn’t like hearing “Hitler Youth” and “Nazi” yelled at her when we were out (happened all of twice when she was with me, but that was enough).
Obviously, it was nothing compared to what the Nazis did to people but it did strike me as ironic that what some kids took away from lessons about how the Nazis slaughtered people because of their backgrounds was to tease her because of hers.
I don’t get the thing about blonde hair. You guys don’t really think you needed blonde hair to get by in Nazi Germany, do you? I know they idealized it, but in real life, lots of proud Germans had brown hair.
Given your set of assumptions, I might have made it. I’m a white, straight Gentile with no other markers against me. Let’s suppose that we’re transplanting me back in such a way that today, May 3, 2013, becomes May 3, 1945, so the war’s about to end and I’m a 41-year-old German. Would I have made it? Possibly. I am a bit old to have been pulled into military service right away, but I probably would have been at some point in 1943 or 1944, so maybe I got killed in battle and maybe I didn’t. The odds are PROBABLY not, but not comfortably so.
My mother is German and Dutch. I’m a “heads down” sort of person. (Brown hair, hazel eyed German Dutch, but light skinned).
My father has Roma in him - at this point the family has been “passing” since the 1920s, and the other half or three quarters is mixed Slav, but I take after my mother and my father has an Italian last name, so I could have passed.
Now, my Roma great grandparents, could they have passed had they stayed? Don’t know.
Everyone in my immediate family is blonde haired and blue eyed. The whole family could do a poster for Nazi purity, as long as they didn’t include me. I have the eyes but everything else on me is a bit darker. My siblings have always teased me about being adopted. So, as long as my family didn’t turn me in I would be OK.
I’ve got the double whammy: Jewish descent and gay. (My grandfather’s entire extended family was wiped out.)
Jewish descent, but I’d have absolutely no qualms about hiding it, and I’d start doing so very early. (What? I want to live!) I assume there were non-religious reasons for circumcision back in the day; I’d appropriate one for myself. I’ve got dark hair and pale-ish skin; like plenty of other Dopers, I’m about as “Aryan”-looking as Hitler. So long as I stayed quiet about my politics and avoided religious services (easy, since I’m an atheist), I expect that I’d have a reasonable shot at making it through. I’m slightly too old to be an attractive candidate for conscription; I’d be in trouble by the end of the war, but probably not before then.
Don’t exactly look classic Aryan, but my all family’s protestant English as far back as I can trace, (which is quite a long way), and though there’s a lot of mental illness in the family, I don’t think it’s close enough to tarnish me by association, so I’m OK on background.
I’m pretty left wing and pacifist, but as I’m female and don’t have a history of being really politically active, I reckon I’d stand a decent chance of getting away with that, unless I got caught hiding people or otherwise actively resisting.
I have some friends who would certainly be in deep trouble, so I’m pretty sure I would be at least trying to help them, even if I wasn’t otherwise doing more than laying low.
In my favor, I’m German with a German surname. Blue eyes, light brown hair, pale skin. On the other hand, I’m a liberal pacifist and racism really bothers me. On the other *other *hand, I’m also kind of a coward loner who doesn’t stick my neck out when it comes to politics.
So I probably would have kept my mouth shut and survived based on my ethnicity/looks, but I’d have felt really guilty afterward.
Blonde, blue eyed, mostly German ancestry as long as I didn’t mention my Native American blood, which is in no way apparent, I would probably be fine. Depending on the situation I would probably end up in the Heer, dead on the Eastern Front.
Capt
Your Native American blood wouldn’t have been a problem, would it? I had the impression that Germans, including the Nazis, were fine with all things Native American. Aren’t Karl May’s tales of the American West, with many of his heroes noble red men, a perennial favourite in Germany?
Maybe, but the Nazis were big on the racial purity thing and I would rather be considered pure Aryan if I found myself in Nazi Germany.
Capt
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