Rassenschande
Encyclopedia
Rassenschande or Blutschande ("blood defilement") was the Nazi term for sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, which was punishable by law. This predominately meant Jews and Germans, who were targetting first informally and then by law, but Eastern Europeans brought as slave workers to Germany were also forbidden such relations. Concerted efforts were made to foment popular distaste for it.
When they took power, considerable clashes and infighting had stemmed from conflicting views on what constituted a Jew -- anything from full Jewish background to one-sixteenth part Jewish blood were argued for -- thus complicating the definition of the offense. Some regarded the number of intermarriages as too small to be harmful; such Nazis as Roland Freisler
regarded this as irrelevant owing to the "racial treason" involved. Freisler published a pamphlet that called for banning "mixed-blood" intercourse in 1933, regardless of the "foreign blood" involved, which faced strong public criticism and, at the time, no support from Hitler. His superior, Franz Gürtner
, opposed it both for reasons of popular support and such problematic issues as people who did not know they had Jewish blood, and that allegations of Jewish blood (true or false) could be used for blackmail.
Local officials, however, were already requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry. In 1934, Wilhelm Frick
warned local officials about banning such marriages on their own, but in 1935, authorized them to delay applications by mixed couples. Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples. One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaving and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew." Das Schwarze Korps
, in its April 1935, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in. It reported a story that a Jew had enticed a seventeen-year-old employee into nude midnight bathing -- the girl being saved from suicide only by the intervention of an SS patrol, and a mob of thousands besiged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody.
In 1935, it was criminalized under the Nuremberg Laws
as contrary to the racial policy of Nazi Germany
. Germans found guilty could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty.
The extent of the law meant that the police were insufficient to the task of detecting infractions; more than three-fifths of all Gestapo
cases were prompted by denunciations.
Germans who had intermarried with Jews did not have their unions nullified by the Nuremberg Laws, but were targeted to encourage divorce.
Rape of Jewish women during World War II was also forbidden; though it did little to stop the soldiers, they often killed the woman afterwards, to ensure silence. In the only case where German soldiers were prosecuted for rape during the military campaign in Poland -- the case of mass rape committed by three soldiers against the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój
-- the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande rather than rape.
All foreign workers brought to Germany were treated as a danger to their blood. Particularly with the OST-Arbeiter
s, all sexual relations, even those that did not result in pregnancy, were severely punished. The program to import nannies from Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Ukraine, would result in their working with German children, and quite possibly sexually exploitation; therefore, such women had to be suitable for Germanisation
.
was widely spread in Nazi propaganda. Nazi speakers were enjoined that many Germans did not "recognize what is at stake", citing a newspaper title that called the decision to punish sexual relations between Germans and Jews "A Strange Decision". Even foreign propaganda urged the importance of preventing it with penalties.
Der Stürmer
was preoccupied with such cases, with nearly every issue alleging sexual crimes, often in graphic detail, about Jews. It habitually referred to voluntary relationships as "rape" and "molestation." Fips
portrayed, for instance, a despondant mother smoking while neglecting her child in a lonely rooming house, with a picture of her Jewish seducer on the floor, with the caption: "Everything in her has died. She was ruined by a Jew."
Neues Volk
, the publication of the Office of Racial Policy
, answered questions about acceptable relations. Even an infertile German woman can not marry a Jew as "it offends the honor of the German people" and she should break off the relationship because she is in danger of violating the law. Marriage to a Chinese man, even though the woman is pregnant is likewise forbidden, and the office had seen to it that the man was deported. A Dutch woman raised questions of not only Jewish blood but non-white blood from the colonies, but if they were answered, she would be acceptable. An article also injoined that while foreign workers were welcome, all sexual relations were out of the question.
Film was also used. In Friesennot
, a Frisian character objects to a half-Russian, half-Frisian girl having an affair with a Russian, because Frisian blood outweighs German; her murder for this is presented as in accordance with ancient Germanic custom for "race pollution." In Die goldene Stadt
, a young, innocent country girl, a Sudeten German, allows a Czech to seduce her; this racial pollution is one reason why she commits suicide, in a deliberate change insisted on by the Propaganda Ministry, since the disgraced daughter should suffer rather than the guiltless father, who commited suicide in the source. In Jud Süß
, the title Jew relentlessly pursues a pure Aryan maid; after he succeeds, by having her husband arrested and tortured, and offering to free him for her compliance, she drowns herself. In Die Reise nach Tilsit
, the Polish seductress persuades the German husband to murder his virtuous German wife to run off with her, but the husband fails in it and in the end, contrite, returns to his wife.
Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volksturm, racial consciousness, to prevent sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers. Pamphlets enjoined all German women to avoid sexual intercourse with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.
By the mid-1930s, more substantial materials were produced, including many pamphlets such as Can You Think Racially?.
The German National Catechism, a pamphlet widely used in schools, included among its questions
"The Jewish Question in Education", a pamphlet for teachers, lamented that many girls and women had been ruined by Jews because no one had warned them of the perils, "no one introduced them to the god-given secrets and laws of blood and race." Such unions could produce children of mixed blood
("a lamentable creature, tossed back and forth by the blood of his two races"), and even when they did not, "the curse also sticks to the defiled mother, never leaving her for the rest of her life. Racial defilement is racial death. Racial defilement is bloodless murder. A woman defiled by the Jew can never rid her body of the foreign poison she has absorbed. She is lost to her people." The League of German Girls
was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid racial defilement. The pamphlet further claimed that Jews avoided such racial mixing, but preached to other nations to weaken them.
Implementation
Prior to the Nazi ascension to power, Hitler often blamed moral degradation on rassenschande, or on "bastardization" -- a way to assure his followers of his continuing anti-Semitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption.When they took power, considerable clashes and infighting had stemmed from conflicting views on what constituted a Jew -- anything from full Jewish background to one-sixteenth part Jewish blood were argued for -- thus complicating the definition of the offense. Some regarded the number of intermarriages as too small to be harmful; such Nazis as Roland Freisler
Roland Freisler
Roland Freisler was a prominent and notorious Nazi lawyer and judge. He was State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice and President of the People's Court , which was set up outside constitutional authority...
regarded this as irrelevant owing to the "racial treason" involved. Freisler published a pamphlet that called for banning "mixed-blood" intercourse in 1933, regardless of the "foreign blood" involved, which faced strong public criticism and, at the time, no support from Hitler. His superior, Franz Gürtner
Franz Gürtner
Franz Gürtner was a German Minister of Justice in Adolf Hitler's cabinet, responsible for coordinating jurisprudence in the Third Reich. Detesting the cruel ways of the Gestapo and SA in dealing with prisoners of war, he protested unsuccessfully to Hitler, nevertheless staying on in the cabinet,...
, opposed it both for reasons of popular support and such problematic issues as people who did not know they had Jewish blood, and that allegations of Jewish blood (true or false) could be used for blackmail.
Local officials, however, were already requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry. In 1934, Wilhelm Frick
Wilhelm Frick
Wilhelm Frick was a prominent German Nazi official serving as Minister of the Interior of the Third Reich. After the end of World War II, he was tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials and executed...
warned local officials about banning such marriages on their own, but in 1935, authorized them to delay applications by mixed couples. Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples. One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaving and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew." Das Schwarze Korps
Das Schwarze Korps
Das Schwarze Korps was the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel . This newspaper was published on Wednesdays and distributed free of charge. Each SS member was supposed to read the publication and urge others to do so as well...
, in its April 1935, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in. It reported a story that a Jew had enticed a seventeen-year-old employee into nude midnight bathing -- the girl being saved from suicide only by the intervention of an SS patrol, and a mob of thousands besiged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody.
In 1935, it was criminalized under the Nuremberg Laws
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
as contrary to the racial policy of Nazi Germany
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race", and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy...
. Germans found guilty could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty.
The extent of the law meant that the police were insufficient to the task of detecting infractions; more than three-fifths of all Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
cases were prompted by denunciations.
Germans who had intermarried with Jews did not have their unions nullified by the Nuremberg Laws, but were targeted to encourage divorce.
Rape of Jewish women during World War II was also forbidden; though it did little to stop the soldiers, they often killed the woman afterwards, to ensure silence. In the only case where German soldiers were prosecuted for rape during the military campaign in Poland -- the case of mass rape committed by three soldiers against the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój
Busko-Zdrój
Busko-Zdrój is a town in Poland, in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship. It is the capital of Busko County. As of 2004, its population is 17,363.-History:...
-- the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande rather than rape.
All foreign workers brought to Germany were treated as a danger to their blood. Particularly with the OST-Arbeiter
OST-Arbeiter
OST-Arbeiter was a designation for slave workers gathered from Eastern Europe to do forced labor in Germany during World War II. The Ostarbeiters were mostly from the territory of Reichskommissariat Ukraine . Ukrainians made up the largest portion although many Belarusians, Russians, Poles and...
s, all sexual relations, even those that did not result in pregnancy, were severely punished. The program to import nannies from Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Ukraine, would result in their working with German children, and quite possibly sexually exploitation; therefore, such women had to be suitable for Germanisation
Germanisation
Germanisation is both the spread of the German language, people and culture either by force or assimilation, and the adaptation of a foreign word to the German language in linguistics, much like the Romanisation of many languages which do not use the Latin alphabet...
.
Propaganda
Inculcating acceptance of this distinction, and the need for racial hygieneRacial hygiene
Racial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable...
was widely spread in Nazi propaganda. Nazi speakers were enjoined that many Germans did not "recognize what is at stake", citing a newspaper title that called the decision to punish sexual relations between Germans and Jews "A Strange Decision". Even foreign propaganda urged the importance of preventing it with penalties.
Der Stürmer
Der Stürmer
Der Stürmer was a weekly tabloid-format Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher from 1923 to the end of World War II in 1945, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of the Nazi propaganda machinery and was vehemently anti-Semitic...
was preoccupied with such cases, with nearly every issue alleging sexual crimes, often in graphic detail, about Jews. It habitually referred to voluntary relationships as "rape" and "molestation." Fips
Philipp Rupprecht
Philipp Rupprecht was a German cartoonist best known for his antisemitic caricatures in the Nazi publication Der Stürmer, under the pen-name Fips.-Career:...
portrayed, for instance, a despondant mother smoking while neglecting her child in a lonely rooming house, with a picture of her Jewish seducer on the floor, with the caption: "Everything in her has died. She was ruined by a Jew."
Neues Volk
Neues Volk
Neues Volk was the monthly publication of the Office of Racial Policy in Nazi Germany. Founded by Walter Gross in 1933, it was a mass-market, illustrated magazine. It aimed at a wide audience, achieving a circulation of 300,000...
, the publication of the Office of Racial Policy
Office of Racial Policy
The NSDAP Office of Racial Policy was a Nazi Party office created in 1933 for "unifying and supervising all indoctrination and propaganda work in the field of population and racial politics"...
, answered questions about acceptable relations. Even an infertile German woman can not marry a Jew as "it offends the honor of the German people" and she should break off the relationship because she is in danger of violating the law. Marriage to a Chinese man, even though the woman is pregnant is likewise forbidden, and the office had seen to it that the man was deported. A Dutch woman raised questions of not only Jewish blood but non-white blood from the colonies, but if they were answered, she would be acceptable. An article also injoined that while foreign workers were welcome, all sexual relations were out of the question.
Film was also used. In Friesennot
Friesennot
Friesennot is a 1935 German film directed by Peter Hagen.The film is also known as Dorf im roten Sturm and Frisions in Distress .- Plot :...
, a Frisian character objects to a half-Russian, half-Frisian girl having an affair with a Russian, because Frisian blood outweighs German; her murder for this is presented as in accordance with ancient Germanic custom for "race pollution." In Die goldene Stadt
Die goldene Stadt
Die goldene Stadt , is a 1941 German film directed by Veit Harlan, starring Kristina Söderbaum, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and in Agfacolor.-Plot:...
, a young, innocent country girl, a Sudeten German, allows a Czech to seduce her; this racial pollution is one reason why she commits suicide, in a deliberate change insisted on by the Propaganda Ministry, since the disgraced daughter should suffer rather than the guiltless father, who commited suicide in the source. In Jud Süß
Jud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
, the title Jew relentlessly pursues a pure Aryan maid; after he succeeds, by having her husband arrested and tortured, and offering to free him for her compliance, she drowns herself. In Die Reise nach Tilsit
Die Reise nach Tilsit
Die Reise nach Tilsit is a German 1939 film directed by Veit Harlan. It is a sound remake of the silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which was based on Hermann Sudermann's short story "Die Reise nach Tilsit"; Harlan maintained it was a true film, whereas Sunrise was only a poem, and it...
, the Polish seductress persuades the German husband to murder his virtuous German wife to run off with her, but the husband fails in it and in the end, contrite, returns to his wife.
Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volksturm, racial consciousness, to prevent sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers. Pamphlets enjoined all German women to avoid sexual intercourse with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.
In schools
Implemention began in schools so rapidly that book production could not keep up; the ministry held that no student should graduate "unless he has perceived that the future of a Volk depends on race and inheritance and understood the obligation this places on him," and so urged for teacher courses using mimeographed materials and cheaply produced books. Students were given poems to memorize:By the mid-1930s, more substantial materials were produced, including many pamphlets such as Can You Think Racially?.
The German National Catechism, a pamphlet widely used in schools, included among its questions
"The Jewish Question in Education", a pamphlet for teachers, lamented that many girls and women had been ruined by Jews because no one had warned them of the perils, "no one introduced them to the god-given secrets and laws of blood and race." Such unions could produce children of mixed blood
Mischling
Mischling was the German term used during the Third Reich to denote persons deemed to have only partial Aryan ancestry. The word has essentially the same origin as mestee in English, mestizo in Spanish and métis in French...
("a lamentable creature, tossed back and forth by the blood of his two races"), and even when they did not, "the curse also sticks to the defiled mother, never leaving her for the rest of her life. Racial defilement is racial death. Racial defilement is bloodless murder. A woman defiled by the Jew can never rid her body of the foreign poison she has absorbed. She is lost to her people." The League of German Girls
League of German Girls
The League of German Girls or League of German Maidens , was the girl's wing of the overall Nazi party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. It was the only female youth organization in Nazi Germany....
was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid racial defilement. The pamphlet further claimed that Jews avoided such racial mixing, but preached to other nations to weaken them.