Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Would You Survive the Holocaust?

I am exactly 19% European Jewish according to my DNA results. The great-granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, I have often wondered what would have happened to my family if they hadn't left. If they managed to survive the revolution what would have happened during WWII? In German terms, I would be a Mischling of the second degree. Saved by my families non-practicing history and my Catholic baptism. The life of a Mischling of the second degree was relatively unaffected by Nazi law as while they were subjected to the same job restrictions, they were permitted to marry non-Jewish Germans and were not imprisoned so long as they were German citizens.
Now put yourself in Nazi Germany, where would you stand? Blond hair and blue eyes? You're probably fine. But for basically everyone else, you have to examine Nazi race theory. While it classifies Jews as the priority "enemies", Nazi ideology targeted other groups as well including Gypsies, the disabled, Poles, Soviet POWs, and Afro-Germans. During Hitler's rule, it is believed that between 20,000 and 25,000 Afro-Germans lived in Germany, though subject to the Nuremberg laws no official policies were put in place towards Afro-Germans as the government saw the population as being too small to warrant official guidelines.
Overall, while this is a small sample of what "non-Aryans" were subjected to in Nazi Germany, it is the closest we will get to understanding the Nazi response to POC populations. Though its extremely likely that if there had been a larger POC population in Europe at the time, they would have been one of the main targets of the Nazis.

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