Agree, would have been better for (relative) peace of mind; but as a PP touches on, by no means everyone who in some way fell short of the full Nazi ideal, was slaughtered. If that had been done, a functioning country would have been impossible; and the regime could, in its twisted way, be pragmatic about a lot of things.
I have some Greek and Native American Ancestry, but it doesn’t show. The majority of my ancestors on my father’s side came from Bavaria, the rest from Ireland, and there’s some Dutch on my mother’s side so I’m certain I never would have had trouble ‘looking foreign’.
If I was born in Germany around the turn of the 20th Century, I would have gotten out when the Nazis came to power; emigrated to America or anywhere else that would take me. That is, if I hadn’t been killed in the post-war partisan fighting.
Had I been born after “The Great War”, I’m sure I would have ended up dying on the Eastern Front.
If you were to transplant today-me to 1934 Munich or Berlin, I would have likely said something to reflect my pro-union politics, been picked up, interrogated and sent to a camp somewhere that my electronic and technical skills could be used.
Yeah. I’m very WASPy so at my current age (42) I’d have been drafted sometime in the later stages of the war. Hopefully I’d not be subsequently killed or wounded in combat. I’d definitely have been hoping for a posting to the western front.
Well, Im pretty liberal/socialist in my leanings, but I have spent time learning to shut up when appropriate (learning, not entirely mastering) so I might have been ok. My Dad is a Mason so that would have been a strike against.
So if the Liberal/socialist Freemason thing could be hidden, I would be safe. Green eyes, WASP and Nordic lineage (although Great Grandmother was a Red Finn, so maybe not… other side of the family is White Finns) . I’m pretty white bread looking. Good breeding stock, and waring nations need cannon fodder. If political affiliations could be hidden, I would be ok, but I am NOT OKAY with that.
Not sure about point 5, but the rest are probably tolerable. After all Heinrich Himmler wore glasses.
One interesting point to raise though, while in Anglo-American countries circumcision became popular during the Victorian age, I’m not so sure about Germany. So if one is circumcised and gets examined by a doctor or something, that may raise some problems…
By the way, someone earlier mentioned being Pakistani: that wasn’t necessarily a problem in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were usually quite happy to cultivate non-Aryans who were opposed to the Commonwealth &/or the US &/or the Soviet Union:
Being a Muslim wasn’t necessarily a problem, either:
Mulsim Waffen SS divisions
Haj Amin al-Husseini
I abhor military discipline and I cannot march in line (literally, not just figuratively). So I’d have a pretty hard time (must have inherited this from my father who ran away when they tried to put him in a uniform in the last days of the war when he was just 15 years old).
At the risk of being accused of a prurient excess of interest in this issue: I have read that this matter quite often put guys in Hitler’s Europe, in danger. On the European Continent in that era, non-religious circumcision was uncommon, and usually done only for specific medical reasons. Nazi petty officials and “enforcers” generally, were often ignorant, and not open to new information – being circumcised, put one under suspicion of being Jewish, and it was not unknown for Gentiles to be liquidated for this reason alone.
(Moslems are of course circumcised too; but these dorks would have been pretty unlikely to know that, or believe it if told about it.)
I think the easiest way to get around the circumcision issue is to simply make up a story about getting caught in your zipper as a kid, then shoot off some slurs about “that damn Jew paediatrician” for good measure.
So my choices are
- Get cut to ribbons for being a non Aryan, despite the fact that I am of Iranic origin.
- Be hanged by the British for treason.
Mr Hobson.:rolleyes:
The Nazis wouldn’t have death-camped you just for being who you are. Plenty of Indians, including Muslims from what would later become Pakistan, were treated the same as other Commonwealth PoWs, which was no picnic but was a lot better than the slave labour camps and the death camps.
And you’d have only been hung for treason if you’d signed up to fight for the Nazis: the majority of Indian PoWs didn’t.
Southern European. So long as I managed to keep my big mouth shut, I figure I’d be chugging along with the rest, never realizing that some of the neighbors who’d moved away hadn’t hopped on a train of their own volition.
The notion of blond and blue-eyed Germans really is a stereotype. For instance, if you go to the South West of Germany, you’ll find a majority of folks with black hair and a rather dark complexion; the Nazis were well aware of this. Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels (who was 5 ft 4 in and had a club foot) really didn’t look like a Nordic God. And Hitler’s hair wasn’t blond either.
Franco was smart enough to stay out of WW2, but Spain was a fascist dictatorship just like Germany at the time, and the Nazis played a very active part in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of Franco.
Lots of Spaniards volunteered to fight for Nazi Germany, including an entire infantry division and a whole lot of airmen.
As a Spaniard you’d have been just fine in Nazi Germany.
The only ethnicities for which you’re automatically doomed are if you’re fully Jewish or Roma. Slavs and blacks also would have a hard time although it depends on a lot of factors. Otherwise, you would be tolerated and likely to survive unless you have something else the Nazis find problemetic.
Good question. A branch of my family lived in Poland during WWII, and they changed their last names because it sounded “too Jewish” (there are some moderately well-known people with my last name who are, in fact, Jewish. They live in the US). I don’t think any of them were taken during the German occupation.
On the other hand, the Nazis had it in for non-Jewish Poles, too, and they executed almost 2 million non-Jewish Poles in the concentration camps. So I couldn’t guarantee that I’d have survived.
I answered both “i’d be fine” and “no - I’m a liberal” because it depends on a lot of factors. Most importantly, how imaginary me would weigh the evil of the Nazi regime versus the danger of opposing it when it hadn’t yet consolidated power. After they had, I would try to lay low and figure that there wouldn’t be anything I could do against a regime that geniunely had a lot of public support.
However, even if I had been an active anti-nazi liberal in that time period, I may have still been okay, because if every liberal who had simply written letters to the editor and/or attended anti-nazi rallies had been arrested, there would be a serious shortage of workers.
But another wrench in the works is my possible Jewish relatives. I have a great-grandfather with a jewish-sounding name, although he most likely was not Jewish*. My brother also married into a self-described half-Jewish family. Now, neither of these would have gotten me in trouble with the authorities by themselves, but I wonder if added to my attested anti-Nazi feelings this may have made the difference. Especially if someone had it out for me if they considered me insufficiently pro-Nazi (which I wouldn’t have the heart to do realistically despite the danger. I’m not good at faking.)
*My dad told me a story about how he had Jewish teachers growing up in New York who were unabashedly prejudiced against him because of his German blood. If he had had a Jewish grandfather this probably would have been different. At the very least, even if my dad had been “embellishing” the story which he is wont to do on occastion, I would have expected him to say “and I told him that I had a Jewish grandfather and would have been considered Jewish by the Nazis, but that didn’t sway him at all!”.
If (as I largely do anyway) I had kept quiet about my political opinions, I would probably have been alright. (I am assuming that if I had grown up back there and then that both my political opinions and my general political demeanor would nevertheless have been similar to what they are now. This is, no doubt, a baseless assumption.)
I do have a Jewish uncle, but he is not blood relative, so I suppose I would be in the clear there. However, they might not like the fact that his wife, my aunt (who is, of course, a blood relative, as are their children), converted to Judaism when she married him.
Well I’m pale and grey eyed, so physically I’d have been ok… but I’m also a mentally ill bisexual trade union member (much as it pains me to admit the latter in public).
I might have been able to get by, or I might have ended up killed for answering back to the wrong jackbooted thug. I doubt, in all honesty, I’d have been fighting the system from within, I’m sure I’d have been able to tell myself that they weren’t that bad.