Intermarried Jews in the Holocaust

Last updated December 07, 2024

During the Holocaust, the German government was more lenient with Jews who were married to non-Jews. Generally, Jewish spouses in "privileged mixed marriages" were partially exempted from anti-Jewish legislation, and, until early 1945, were largely spared from being deported to ghettos, concentration camps, or extermination camps. The Nuremberg Laws, which forbade Germans from intermarrying with Jews, did not dissolve the marriages of existing German–Jewish couples, though they still came under immense pressure from the Nazi Party, which urged them to divorce in order to end the Jewish partner's legal protection. With a survival rate greatly exceeding that of other Jews, over 90% of intermarried Jews in Germany and German-occupied Europe were able to avoid being murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

Effects

Ban on intermarriage

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws banned marriage between Jews and those of "German blood". Existing marriages were not dissolved.^[1] In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, marriages between Jews and Germans were banned upon the German invasion in March 1939, but it was possible for Jews and ethnic Czechs to marry until March 1942.^[2]

Exemptions

In Germany, marriages between a Jewish woman and a "German-blooded" man in which children were raised without Jewish faith were considered "privileged mixed marriages". Jewish women in such marriages received better rations than other Jews, and were exempted from a variety of Nazi decrees.^[1] Even "non-privileged mixed marriages" brought important privileges, such as the Jewish partner's right not to be deported.^[3]

With Adolf Hitler's approval, Hermann Goering established the privileged mixed marriages category in late December 1938. This category provided exemptions from certain persecution measures for families with gentile husbands and families with children raised as non-Jews due to their supposed closer ties to the German "Volksgemeinschaft". As a result, these families were spared from being ghettoized.^[4]

During the onset of World War II, female Jewish spouses in privileged mixed marriages were exempted from food restrictions and were not required to wear the yellow badge, which was mandatory for all Jews after September 1941.^[5] These exemptions were designed to provide a veneer of legitimacy to the Nazi regime's persecution of Jews and create a division within the Jewish community.^[6]

In the Netherlands, all intermarried couples were exempt from deportation until September 1942, at which point Jewish men without children were no longer exempt. The families had to register with the authorities to receive the exemption.^[7] In the Slovak State ^[8] and the Independent State of Croatia, intermarried Jews were mostly exempt from deportation.^[9] Even if exemptions from deportation did not exist, Jews in mixed marriages often received help from non-Jewish relatives enabling them to hide and survive.^[7]

Other forms of persecution

Instead of being deported, many intermarried Jews in greater Germany were instead drafted into forced labor battalions with Organization Todt.^[1] During the 1943 Fabrikaktion, many intermarried German Jews were arrested. None of them were deported;^[1] some historians have argued that this outcome was the result of the Rosenstrasse protest.^[10] In 1943, those Jews whose marriages had ended were ordered to be deported by the Gestapo; as a result, in January 1944, some 1,000 Jews were deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto. Most of them perished after being transported to Auschwitz concentration camp.^[1] In January 1945, the exemption from deportation was revoked and many intermarried Jews were deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto. However, most of them survived the war.^[1]

In some cases, the Gestapo would arrest intermarried Jews or their non-Jewish spouses on fabricated charges, often as a pretext to steal their property.^[1]^[2]

Pressure to divorce

Intermarried families faced strong pressure to divorce, especially those in which the non-Jewish partner was female.^[1]^[2] The non-Jewish partner often faced loss of a job or property due to Aryanization.^[1] From the fall of 1944, many non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages were drafted for forced labor.^[1] In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, some Czech men married to Jewish women were sent to a forced labor camp and promised release if they agreed to divorce.^[2] In Greater Germany, the divorce rate has been estimated by historians between 7 and 10 percent.^[11]

Statistics

In Amsterdam, intermarried Jews had a 59% lower risk of dying than those who were not intermarried.^[7] By September 1944, 98 percent of surviving German and Austrian Jews were in mixed marriages, according to official statistics.^[1]^[12] More than 90 percent of intermarried Jews from Greater Germany survived the war.^[13] Benjamin Frommer estimates that most intermarried Jews in Bohemia and Moravia survived the Nazi occupation, if they were not divorced or widowed.^[2]

Aftermath

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, intermarried families contended with the attitudes of other Jews and Jewish organizations that disapproved of intermarriage.^[14]^[15]

Related Research Articles

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a partially-annexed territory of Nazi Germany that was established on 16 March 1939 after the German occupation of the Czech lands. The protectorate's population was mostly ethnic Czech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosenstrasse protest</span> 1943 street protest in Nazi Germany

The Rosenstrasseprotest is considered to be a significant event in German history as it is the only mass public demonstration by Germans in the Third Reich against the deportation of Jews. The protest on Rosenstraße took place in Berlin during February and March 1943. This demonstration was initiated and sustained by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men and Mischlinge,. Their husbands had been targeted for deportation, based on the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and detained in the Jewish community house on Rosenstrasse. The protests, which occurred over the course of seven days, continued until the men being held were released by the Gestapo. The protest by the women of the Rosenstrasse led to the release of approximately 1,800 Berlin Jews.

Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role. Unlike other ghettos, the exploitation of forced labor was not economically significant.

The history of the Jews in Slovakia goes back to the 11th century, when the first Jews settled in the area.

The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic, goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 16th and 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 2,300 Jews estimated to be living in the Czech Republic.

Interfaith marriage in Judaism was historically looked upon with very strong disfavor by Jewish leaders, and it remains a controversial issue among them today. Many Jews followed the Talmud and the resulting Jewish law, Halakha until the advent of new Jewish movements following the Jewish Enlightenment resulted in the Haskala; in Halakha, marriage between a Jew and a gentile is both prohibited and also void under Jewish law.

Fabrikaktion is the term for the last major roundup of Jews for deportation from Berlin, which began on 27 February 1943, and ended about a week later. Most of the remaining Jews were working at Berlin plants or for the Jewish welfare organization. The term Fabrikaktion was coined by survivors after World War II; the Gestapo had designated the plan Große Fabrik-Aktion. While the plan was not restricted to Berlin, it later became most notable for catalyzing the Rosenstrasse protest, the only mass public demonstration of German citizens which contested the Nazi government's deportation of the Jews.

Anti-Jewish laws have been a common occurrence throughout Jewish history. Examples of such laws include special Jewish quotas, Jewish taxes and Jewish "disabilities".

Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage sometimes, also criminalizing sex between members of different races.

The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of 89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, an estimated 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.

During World War II, the Theresienstadt Ghetto was used by the Nazi SS as a "model ghetto" for deceiving International Committee of the Red Cross representatives about the ongoing Holocaust and the Nazi plan to murder all Jews. The Nazified German Red Cross visited the ghetto in 1943 and filed the only accurate report on the ghetto, describing overcrowding and undernourishment. In 1944, the ghetto was "beautified" in preparation for a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Danish government. The delegation visited on 23 June; ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel wrote a favorable report on the ghetto and claimed that no one was deported from Theresienstadt. In April 1945, another ICRC delegation was allowed to visit the ghetto; despite the contemporaneous liberation of other concentration camps, it continued to repeat Rossel's erroneous findings. The SS turned over the ghetto to the ICRC on 2 May, several days before the end of the war.

Presidential exemptions were granted by President of the Slovak State Jozef Tiso to individual Jews, exempting them from systematic persecution through anti-Jewish legislation introduced by Tiso's Jewish Code,, during the Holocaust. The exemptions were exchanged for arbitrary monetary fees. From an estimated 20,000 requests, 600 documented exemptions covering 1,000 people were granted, but only after 1942, when deportations to Auschwitz death camp had already stopped. Following the German invasion of 1944, when deportations resumed, all exemptions were nullified.

The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.

The Holocaust in the Sudetenland resulted in the flight, dispossession, deportation and ultimately death of many of the 24,505 Jews living in the Reichsgau Sudetenland, an administrative region of Nazi Germany established from former Czechoslovak territory annexed after the October 1938 Munich Agreement. Due to harassment and violence, including during Kristallnacht, ninety percent of the Jews had already left the Sudetenland by mid-1939. The remaining Jews were subject to property confiscation and eventually deportation. During the later years of the war, tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews were forced laborers in a network of concentration camps in the Sudetenland.

<i>Arijský boj</i> Fascist Czech newspaper (1940–1945)

Arijský boj was a pro-Nazi Czech-language weekly tabloid newspaper published between May 1940 and May 1945 in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Inspired by the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, the newspaper made antisemitism its main theme and was also critical of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Denunciations published by the newspaper contributed to the isolation of Jews during the first years of the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia.

<i>The Greater German Reich and the Jews</i>

The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935–1945 is a book about the Holocaust in areas annexed by Nazi Germany. The book's chapters are arranged in chronological order by annexation date and cover the Saarland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Memel Territory, Danzig and West Prussia, the Warthegau, Zichenau, East Upper Silesia, Eupen-Malmedy, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine. It was first published in German in 2010; an English translation was published in 2015. The book was edited by Jörg Osterloh and Wolf Gruner. The book received generally favorable reviews.

<i>The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia</i> (book) Book by Wolf Gruner

The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses is a book by the German historian Wolf Gruner on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-majority parts of Czechoslovakia partially annexed into Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Beginning before the Munich Agreement, Gruner's book covers the various stages of persecution of Jews which led to their deportation and murder. He argues that the role of Czech collaboration and local initiatives was greater than has been conventionally assumed, and also that Jewish resistance to persecution was substantial. The book has received mixed reviews; some Czech historians have disagreed with Gruner's conclusions while other reviewers generally praised the book with some reservations. The book was published in German in 2016 and in English and Czech in 2019. It received the 2017 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association.

The Holocaust in Germany was the systematic persecution, deportation, imprisonment, and murder of Jews in Germany as part of the Europe-wide Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The term typically refers only to the areas that were part of Germany prior to the Nazi regime coming to power and excludes some or all of the territories annexed by Nazi Germany, such as Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

A paper divorce is a case in which a couple obtains a legal divorce but continues to live together as before. It may be done for financial reasons, such as to isolate medical debts to only fall on the ill partner. If the divorce is fraudulent, it is called a sham divorce.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Strnad, Maximilian (2015). "The Fortune of Survival – Intermarried German Jews in the Dying Breath of the 'Thousand-Year Reich'". Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust. 29 (3): 173–196. doi:10.1080/23256249.2015.1082806. S2CID 163076737.
1 2 3 4 5 Frommer, Benjamin (2020). "Privileged Victims: Intermarriage between Jews, Czechs, and Germans in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". In Edgar, Adrienne; Frommer, Benjamin (eds.). Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 47–82. ISBN 978-1-4962-0211-6.
↑ Raggam-Blesch, Michaela (2019). ""Privileged" under Nazi-Rule: The Fate of Three Intermarried Families in Vienna". Journal of Genocide Research. 21 (3): 378–397. doi: 10.1080/14623528.2019.1634908 . PMC 6817312 . PMID 31708684.
↑ Strnad, Maximilian (2019), Ross, Steven J.; Gruner, Wolf; Ansell, Lisa (eds.), "A Question of Gender! Spaces of Violence and Reactions to Kristallnacht in Jewish-Gentile Families", New Perspectives on Kristallnacht, After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison, Purdue University Press, pp. 51–68, ISBN 978-1-55753-870-3 , retrieved 2024-12-06
↑ . Decree of the Reichs Ministry of Alimentation and Agriculture, March 11, 1940, Nürnberger Dokumente (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), NI 14581; Police regulations on the mandatory identification of Jews, September 1, 1941, in Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl.) I 1941, p. 547
↑ Alfred Gottwaldt and Diana Schulle, Die “Judendeportationen” aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945. Eine kommentierte Chronologie (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2005).
1 2 3 Tammes, Peter (2017). "Surviving the Holocaust: Socio-demographic Differences Among Amsterdam Jews". European Journal of Population. 33 (3): 293–318. doi: 10.1007/s10680-016-9403-3 . PMC 5493707 . PMID 28725097.
↑ Ward, James Mace (2002). ""People Who Deserve It": Jozef Tiso and the Presidential Exemption". Nationalities Papers. 30 (4): 571–601. doi:10.1080/00905992.2002.10540508. ISSN 1465-3923. S2CID 154244279.
↑ Hoppenbrouwers, Frans (2004). "The principal victim: Catholic antisemitism and the holocaust in Central Europe". Religion, State and Society. 32 (1): 37–51. doi:10.1080/0963749042000182078. S2CID 54691262.
↑ Gruner, Wolf; Marcum, Ursula (2003). "The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943: Sixty Years Later". Central European History. 36 (2): 179–208. doi:10.1163/156916103770866112. ISSN 0008-9389. JSTOR 4547298. S2CID 146326322.
↑ Bukey 2010, p. 94.
↑ Bukey, Evan Burr (2010). "Epilogue and Conclusions". Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-49729-9.
↑ Bukey 2010, p. 133.
↑ Strnad, Maximilian (2020). "Petitioning for "Equal Treatment": The Struggles of Intermarried Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany". In Kaplan, Thomas Pegelow; Gruner, Wolf (eds.). Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78920-720-0.
↑ Yehudai, Ori (2020). ""Doubtful Cases": Intermarried Families in the Post-Holocaust Jewish World". Immigrants & Minorities. 38 (1–2): 27–53. doi: 10.1080/02619288.2020.1794839 .