Nazi racial distinctions
Nazi efforts to safeguard the "purity of race" by codifying racial distinctions affected Jewish life in Germany at almost every turn. According to most definitions, a Jew is either born into the Jewish people, or becomes one through religious conversion. The debate centers around some of the following questions:
- Mixed parentage debate - tries to identify when people with mixed parentage should be considered Jewish, and when they should not be.
- Conversion debate - centers around the process of religious conversion in an attempt to specify which conversions to Judaism should be considered valid, and which should not.
- Life circumstances debate - focuses on whether people's actions (such as conversion to a different religion) or circumstances in their lives (such as being unaware of Jewish parentage) affect their status as a Jew.
As defined by the Nuremberg laws in 1935, a Jew was somebody who had at least three Jewish grandparents --- regardless of religious affiliation or self-identification. The latter did matter for people with two Jewish grandparents: if they belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to Jews, they were classified as Jewish; if neither, they were considered Mischlinge of the first degree. Somebody with only one Jewish grandparent was classified as a Mischlinge of the second degree.
Persons meeting the 1st or 2nd degree Mischlinge criteria were often Roman Catholic by religion: In the 19th Century a sizable number of German Jews converted to Christianity, with virtually all of those doing so choosing to become Roman Catholics rather than Protestants; as a result, due to intermarriage, a number of Roman Catholics in Germany had some traceable Jewish ancestry by the time the Nazis came to power.
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The HolocaustResearchProject
The depravity of the Nazi regime was sickening!
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