Let’s say that you were a self-proclaimed Jew in Germany during the 1930’s. You decided not to leave the country for some reason, but you saw the writing on the walls… literally. Could you publicly convert to Chistianity and the Nazis would then just leave you alone? Would you have to attend church regularly to prove you were no longer Jewish, or didn’t it matter since you were born Jewish and therefore there was nothing you could do about it? Or could you just denounce your religion and become an atheist?
AFAIK this didn’t work because the Nazis were against the “race” as opposed to just the religious adherents.
It was the ancestry that counted, not the practice. Quite a few people of Jewish ancestry who were not practicing Jews were taken.
Devout Christians were not very popular with the Nazi’s either; the party line was a scorn of all religion. But a vocal atheism would not save you if you had some other “defect.”
Even people who didn’t know they had Jewish ancestry were taken to the camps. If one of your parents converted to Christianity and hid their Jewish roots and raised you as a Christian, you’d still be considered a Jew by the Nazis.
Nope. Witness the case of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (aka Edith Stein).
That didn’t even work for the Jews in Spain during the Inquisition.
Well to be fair they weren’t expecting it.
I’m so sorry
:o
With respect to this question, may I strongly recommend the two volume diary of Victor Klemperer. It is an extraordinary account which, once started, is (IMHO) impossible to put down. Klemperer was born a Jew (his father was actually a rabbi) but converted to Christianity as a young man. In his diary, it becomes painfully clear how that offered absolutely no protection against Nazi persecution. As others here have said, the Nazis considered Jews a race and thus conversion irrelevant.
In terms of the diaries, I cannot praise them enough. Klemperer somehow managed to stay, and survive, IN Germany for that entire interval 1933 to 1945 (the Nazi era, the Third Reich). Klemperer was obviously a VERY smart guy - a professor of comparative literature who, himself, spoke seven or eight languages. He also writes EXTREMELY well and it’s more than impressive, considering he never meant for them to be read by anyone other than himself, and certainly never for them to be published, that they “read” so well. You have to keep reminding yourself that you’re reading a diary and not a novel or some work of fiction. Truly an amazing work.
By the way, in addition to keeping a diary from '33 to ‘45, Klemperer also did the groundwork during that time for a volume on the “Language of the Third Reich”. He makes many allusions to it in the diaries themselves and, in particular, especially as a professor of ‘words’ and literature, he found the Nazis’ perversion of language simultaneously both fascinating and sickening. Even the little snippets of this that he includes in his diaries are really interesting. I am looking forward to reading his book on the Language of the Third Reich.
I Will Bear Witness (1933 - 1941)
Actually, before the expulsion, Spain allowed Jews to convert. The Inquisition looked for backsliding, which could include not cooking on Saturday or eating too many chickpeas, which had been associated with Jewish cooking in the area. It also included failure to keep the Catholic ‘fast days’ properly.
I have a cookbook in which the author recreated medieval Jewish/Spanish recipies from Inquisition records. The testimony was mostly from neighbors and servants. So, before the expulsion, conversion was allowed, but it was easy to be charged with backsliding.
Some partial Jews did manage to survive by being half-Jewish (Mischingle to the Nazis), but the Nazis tried to take them away once and planned to finish the job later. Their wives* intervened and the regime backed down. This actually became an embarrassment later, as it made clear that ordinary germans could have stopped the mess had they chosen to do so.
Other Jews went underground (commonly called “U-boats” or submarines) with forged papers. These unfortunately tende dto congregate in certain clubs, where the Nazis sent in spies. For many, a favorite cafe became a death sentence. But you could survive with caution and being quite unnoticable, and moving somewhere else with false papers.
- I think that half-Jewish women were left alone, but full Jewish women were not. I’m not certain about full Jewish women who had married “Aryans.”
Actually, the men were Jewish; their wives were not. The women protesting is known as the Rosenstrasse Protest.
Thats’ what I said:
“Some partial Jews did manage to survive by being half-Jewish (Mischingle to the Nazis), but the Nazis tried to take them away once and planned to finish the job later. Their wives* intervened and the regime backed down.”
EVERYone expects a lame Monty Python reference whenever the Spanish Inquisition is mentioned!