"related blood" in documents

Discussions on the propaganda, architecture and culture in the Third Reich.
Frischluft
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Re: "related blood" in documents

#16

Post by Frischluft » 19 Mar 2021, 13:36

gebhk wrote:
18 Mar 2021, 14:21
If blond and blue-eyed people are supposed to be superior to other colourings then the statistical Pole and Russian was and is superior to the statistical German.
Ironically, the Nazi movement started in one of Germany's most pigmented areas. This was one of the reasons why the brown-eyed, brown-haired Dinaric race was seen as superior to the grey-eyed, ash blond East Baltic race. Another reason was that Günther described East Baltics as small and cunning, Dinarics as tall and brave, which let the latter appear as better soldiers.

Image

Source: Ripley, William Z. The Racial Geography of Europe. Online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_ ... _Germany_X.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#17

Post by George L Gregory » 19 Mar 2021, 23:13

gebhk wrote:
18 Mar 2021, 14:21
Hi Hans

No judgement implied. It's all hooey.

Just pointing out the irony of the inconsistencies in Nazi belief. If blond and blue-eyed people are supposed to be superior to other colourings then the statistical Pole and Russian was and is superior to the statistical German. Oops. Mind you, its not as illogical as it would seem. I've always thought that the sort of murderous animus that the Nazis displayed comes from deep-rooted feelings of inferiority and envy. Though why on earth, given the massive German contributions to culture, science and technology, any German should feel that way is beyond me.
The Nazis considered Poles, Russians and other Slavs who were Nordic to be of Germanic descent rather than of Slavic descent. The Nazis considered Slavs to be originally Nordic but over the centuries they had mixed with non-Nordic people which was why Eastern Europe was to be deemed so racially mixed. Heinrich Himmler allowed a Polish man, Russian man, etc, to have sexual intercourse with German women as long as the man possessed a Nordic appearance as a way to recover so-called German blood.

Remember what Himmler wrote secretly in 1940 about the "alien races" in the East:
Apart from this school there are to be no schools at all in the East. Parents, who from the beginning want to give their children better schooling in the elementary school as well as later on in a higher school, must take an application to the Higher SS and Police Leaders. The first consideration in dealing with this application will be whether the child is racially perfect and conforming to our conditions. If we acknowledge such a child to be as of our blood, the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to a school in Germany and that it will permanently remain in Germany.

Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best one if, out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.

The parents of such children of good blood will be given the choice to either give away their child; they will then probably produce no more children so that the danger of this subhuman people of the East [Untermenschenvolk des Ostens] obtaining class of leaders which, since it would be equal to us, would also be dangerous for us, will disappear--or else the parents pledge themselves to go to Germany and to become loyal citizens there. The love toward their child, whose future and education depends on the loyalty of the parents, will be a strong weapon in dealing with them.

Apart from examining the applications made by parents for better schooling of their children, there will be an annual sifting of all children of the Government General between the ages of 6 to 10 years in order to separate the racially valuable and non-valuable ones. The ones considered racially valuable will be treated in the same way as the children who are admitted on the basis of the approved application of their parents.

I consider it as a matter of course from an emotional as well as from a rational viewpoint that the moment children and parents come to Germany they are not treated like lepers in the schools and in everyday life, but, after having changed their names, they should, in full confidence, be incorporated into the German life, although attention and vigilance must be exercised with regard to them. It must not happen that the children be made to feel as outcasts, because, after all, we believe in this, our own blood, which, through the errors of German history has flowed into an alien nationality and we are convinced that our ideology and our ideals will strike a chord of resonance in the racially equal soul of these children. Here teachers and Hitler Youth leaders especially must do an out-and-out job, and the mistake that has been made in the past with the people from Alsace Lorraine must never be repeated; namely, that on one side one wants to win the people as Germans, and on the other side one constantly hurts and repudiates their human value, their pride and honor through distrust and insults. Insults like "Polack" and "Ukrainian" or something like that must be made impossible.
The Nazis kidnapped loads of Polish children and other Slavic children and forced them to be Germanised.


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Re: "related blood" in documents

#18

Post by Hans1906 » 20 Mar 2021, 13:41

George,

I love my fatherland, as I'm sure every one of us here in this forum does. I also stand by our German past, without ifs and buts.
Mutual offsetting of guilt is very difficult more than 75 years after the end of the last world war, feelings do not belong in this topic, but respect and also honesty.

Racism of any kind does not belong in this topic, I personally do not put on this shoe, this shoe has always been too small for me.

Seppo,

thank you for your two links, which I read with great interest...


Hans1906
The paradise of the successful lends itself perfectly to a hell for the unsuccessful. (Bertold Brecht on Hollywood)

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#19

Post by George L Gregory » 20 Mar 2021, 22:40

Frischluft wrote:
19 Mar 2021, 13:36
gebhk wrote:
18 Mar 2021, 14:21
If blond and blue-eyed people are supposed to be superior to other colourings then the statistical Pole and Russian was and is superior to the statistical German.
Ironically, the Nazi movement started in one of Germany's most pigmented areas. This was one of the reasons why the brown-eyed, brown-haired Dinaric race was seen as superior to the grey-eyed, ash blond East Baltic race. Another reason was that Günther described East Baltics as small and cunning, Dinarics as tall and brave, which let the latter appear as better soldiers.

Image

Source: Ripley, William Z. The Racial Geography of Europe. Online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_ ... _Germany_X.
The Nazis created plaster molds of different racial types and the Dinaric race was used as an example of the Aryan race by anthropologists

Image

https://www.ushmm.org/information/press ... pe-dinaric

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#20

Post by Frischluft » 20 Mar 2021, 23:55

My translation of an extract from the Ahnenpaß (ancestry passport):
The term Aryan descent.

Since, according to the results of raciology, the German people contain beside the determining influence of the Nordic race also to a lesser and computationally not ascertainable extent other more or less related racial components, which are also the building blocks of the European neighboring peoples, one chose for this superordinate term of the totality of the races contained in the German people the designation Aryan (deviating from linguistics!), and thus summarized the German and closely related blood to a racial unit. The term "German or species-related blood" in the Reich Citizenship Law has the exact same range.

Of Aryan descent (= "German-blooded") is therefore that human being who is free from a—from the perspective of the German people—foreign blood element. As foreign is considered at this point particularly the blood of the Jews and Gypsies who also live in the European settlement area, that of the Asiatic and African races and the natives of Australia and America (Indians), while e.g. an Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian, if he himself is free from such blood influences, which are also foreign to him, must be considered as related, i.e. as Aryan, may he now live in his homeland, in East Asia or in America, or may he be a citizen of the USA or a South American free state. It is self-evident that for a marriage, for example, the German people's comrade, the girl of pure German descent is closer to us than another Aryan of more distant racial affinity.
German: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... anonym.jpg

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#21

Post by George L Gregory » 21 Mar 2021, 01:18

Frischluft wrote:
20 Mar 2021, 23:55
My translation of an extract from the Ahnenpaß (ancestry passport):
The term Aryan descent.

Since, according to the results of raciology, the German people contain beside the determining influence of the Nordic race also to a lesser and computationally not ascertainable extent other more or less related racial components, which are also the building blocks of the European neighboring peoples, one chose for this superordinate term of the totality of the races contained in the German people the designation Aryan (deviating from linguistics!), and thus summarized the German and closely related blood to a racial unit. The term "German or species-related blood" in the Reich Citizenship Law has the exact same range.

Of Aryan descent (= "German-blooded") is therefore that human being who is free from a—from the perspective of the German people—foreign blood element. As foreign is considered at this point particularly the blood of the Jews and Gypsies who also live in the European settlement area, that of the Asiatic and African races and the natives of Australia and America (Indians), while e.g. an Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian, if he himself is free from such blood influences, which are also foreign to him, must be considered as related, i.e. as Aryan, may he now live in his homeland, in East Asia or in America, or may he be a citizen of the USA or a South American free state. It is self-evident that for a marriage, for example, the German people's comrade, the girl of pure German descent is closer to us than another Aryan of more distant racial affinity.
German: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... anonym.jpg
What year was that copy of the Ahnenpass issued?

After the Nuremberg Laws, Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke wrote Civil Rights and the Natural Inequality of Man in 1936 and stated:
A member of any minority group demonstrates his ability to serve the German Reich when, without surrendering membership in his own specific Volk group, he loyally carries out his civil duties to the Reich, such as service in the armed forces, etc. Reich citizenship is, therefore, open to racially related groups living in Germany, such as Poles, Danes, and others. It is an altogether different matter with German nationals of alien blood and race. They do not fulfill the blood prerequisites for Reich citizenship. The Jews, who constitute an alien body among all European peoples, are especially characterized by racial foreignness. Jews, therefore, cannot be seen as being fit for service to the German Volk and Reich. Hence, they must necessarily remain excluded from Reich citizenship.
Anson Rabinbach, Sander L. Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook, page 214.

The Nazis describing the Czechs and Poles certainly didn't do them any favours during WW2. Ironically, the Nazis punished sexual intercourse between two peoples considered Aryans - a German and a Pole - with the latter being hanged. There was a Polish minority in Germany in the 1930s and the Nazis had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934. After WW2 began, ethnic Poles in the annexed territories were not granted Reich citizenship.

The Nazis were quite consistent in being inconsistent when it came to their pseudo-scientific racist nonsense and failing to define racial groups.

Even if peoples were considered to be of related blood, in the end it didn't really mean much.
In the period that followed, the Blood Protection Law underwent further expansion. Thus, the second implementing regulation to the Blood Protection Law broadened its prohibitions to cover those former Polish citizens who had acquired German citizenship—which affected primarily the so-called ethnic Germans—whereas the prohibition against race mixing did not apply to the great mass of Poles (persons with so-called protected status, or politically reliable foreigners). However, the Blood Protection Law was not aimed solely at Jews but also at other "undesirable" "non-Germans." Hence the call for racial purity, upon which the "inner unity" of a people was said to rest, targeted only superficially the neutralizing of the Jews; it actually took aim at "aliens" of all kinds. Thus the prohibition on marriage, as already noted in the introduction, applied not only to marriages contracted between Jews (including Jewish Mischlinge) and "persons of German blood" and between Jews and Mischlinge of the second degree but was also interpreted beyond the wording of the law as being a desideratum (de facto a requirement) for all marriages between "citizens of German or racially related blood" in cases in which "offspring that would endanger the preservation of the purity of German blood could expected to result." Such a threat was assumed to be latent in all liaisons between Germans and "inferior" "non-Germans," including Gypsies, blacks and their descendants, and later the peoples of Eastern Europe. In order to prove that this threat did not exist in liaisons between "partners of different races," it was necessary to obtain a "certificate of fitness for marriage" from the Public Health Office. Poles, too, although in principle deemed to be among the Aryans, were included in the prohibition on race mixing. There was a de facto prohibition against marriage of (stateless) Poles and Germans as well as marriages of Poles who had acquired Germans citizenship and all other "non-Germans." There was no law enunciating such a prohibition. However, it was put into practice all the same by the tried-and-true method of internal administrative guidelines, which dictated that registry officials simply should not record such marriages, in order (and this was of particular significance in the Annexed Eastern Territories) "to achieve a complete separation . . . [of the German citizens] from their Polish surroundings.
Diemut Majer, "Non-Germans" under the Third Reich, pages 102-103.
The basis for all citizenship law measured was the thesis of the collapse of the Polish state, which had automatically occurred on October 26, 1939, the effective date of the Annexation Decree of October 8, 1939. With the Decree issued by the Führer and Reich chancellor on October 12, 1939, on the Administration of the Occupied Polish Territories (the General Government), the local population had automatically lost its Polish citizenship. Remarkably, this establishment of mass statelessness—again contrary to international law but an effective act in terms of intrastate law—was never explicitly declared as such. It emerged as a converse conclusion from the existing regulations and became the dominating principle of administrative practice, as confirmed by the German Supreme Court.

Apart from the special arrangement applying to Danzig (Gdańsk), the Decree on the Organization and Administration of the Annexed Eastern Territories, issued by the Führer and Reich chancellor on October 8, 1939, provided that the inhabitants "of German or related" blood in the Annexed Eastern Territories became German state subjects effective October 26, 1939; from another provision of this decree, that the "ethnic Germans" in these territories simultaneously became citizens of the Reich, one could have drawn the conclusion that the Poles were also "of related extraction" and would therefore also become German state subjects, if the term "of related extraction" was only extended to a sufficient degree.

Indeed, this had been the original intention of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, in the expectation that it would not be possible "to remove all members of alien races from the Annexed Eastern Territories and replace them with members of the German race"; thus the "desired population growth" should provide an opportunity to acquire state subject status, and later Reich citizenship. The Reich Ministry of the Interior therefore proposed that the ethnic Germans in the Annexed Eastern Territories would be distinguished from the Poles not by the possession of German state subject status but by the possession of Reich citizenship. However, because the question of who should be counted among the "desired population growth" had yet to be settled, a circular decree from the Reich Ministry of the Interior dated November 25, 1939, provisionally stipulated that the general acquisition of state subject status by Poles could be considered only after the issue of definitive regulations, which could not currently be promulgated. Because there was no unity at that time on how the Poles should be treated, only the ethnic Germans (the Volksdeutsche) in the Eastern Territories were allowed to become German state subjects and Reich citizens, with the citizenship of the Polish population remaining undecided for the time being; in practical terms, the Poles were treated as stateless, since in the German view the Polish state as a legal entity had disappeared on the capitulation of Poland.
Ibid, pages 236-237.
The key question was how the native population in the annexed territories was to be treated – a question not entirely unfamiliar to German ethnocrats. After the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Memel, the local populations had been granted German citizenship, with the exception in the latter two cases of individuals who had moved to the areas after a given date. The Interior Ministry took a similar approach in Poland after Hitler signed a decree on the "Structure and Organization of the Eastern Territories (October 8, 1939). Inhabitants "of German or related [artverwandten] blood," the ministry announced, would provisionally become "German state citizens" (deutsche Staat-sangehörige). "Ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche), by contrast, would become "Reich citizens" (Reichsbürger) and receive full political rights. In other words, inhabitants of German ancestry who were judged no longer to be members of the German minority on account of their social practices stood in a less advantageous position than the Volksdeutsche who had demonstrated their "Germanness" by, for example, joining German organizations. Only one group was to be categorically excluded from the annexed territories: the artfremde (alien) Polish Jews. Everybody else was put in line for German citizenship, not just the Volksdeutsche but also the supposedly artverwandte Christian Poles. Official racial terminology notwithstanding, the Interior Ministry opted for a very inclusive selection process that aimed to integrate the majority of the population. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what Hitler had in mind when he ruled out the Germanization of Poles in his second book.
Richard F. Wetzell, Mark Roseman, Devin O. Pendas, Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany, page 437.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#22

Post by Frischluft » 21 Mar 2021, 01:43

George L Gregory wrote:
21 Mar 2021, 01:18
What year was that copy of the Ahnenpass issued?
Issue #31 from 1937. This copy from 1944 mentions "German or species-related descent" but does not explain it: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... pdf&page=3.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#23

Post by George L Gregory » 22 Mar 2021, 19:36

Frischluft wrote:
21 Mar 2021, 01:43
George L Gregory wrote:
21 Mar 2021, 01:18
What year was that copy of the Ahnenpass issued?
Issue #31 from 1937. This copy from 1944 mentions "German or species-related descent" but does not explain it: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... pdf&page=3.
I'm not surprised. By that time the Nazis had made a distinction between Germanic people and non-Germanic people.

Isabel Heinemann mentions in depth about how Heinrich Himmler by 1942 differentiated between Germanic people and non-Germanic people in her book Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas.

I quoted German historian Peter Longerich in one of my previous posts about this:
The dangers to 'racial policy' created by mass deportations from eastern Europe to Germany and the numerous provisions for individual cases that were made either to contain these risks or to filter out 'good blood' seem to have prompted Himmler to introduce a radical reversal of racial reversal of racial policy in the spring of 1942. In March that year he decreed, in his capacity as Settlement Commissar, that the term 'related' (artverwandt), which up to that point had been used consistently in Nazi racial terminology to refer to the non-German European nations, was to be replaced by a set of new prescribed terms. The term 'related', it was claimed, was based on the 'presupposition [ . . . ] that the racial structure of all European nations is so closely related to that of the German nation that if interbreeding occurs there is no danger that the German nation's blood will be racially contaminated'. This, it was claimed, is not at all the case, however: even in the European context, 'racial intermingling' was a threat, particularly in the case of contact with 'Slavdom'.

The corresponding directive states that at a meeting in the Party Chancellery of the party branch offices involved it had therefore been decided, 'with immediate effect' (until a comprehensive law protecting German blood was passed after the end of the war), to divide the term 'related' into first, 'German blood and blood of related ( = Germanic) races' (to which members of 'non-Germanic' nations who were 'capable of reGermanization' also belonged, in other words whose who exhibited 'Nordic-Faelish (nordische-fälische) racial elements'), and secondly, 'related blood but not from related races', by which was meant all non-Germanic European nations (Slavs, Latins Celts Balts).

The introduction of this terminology heralded Himmler's policy of permitting Germans in future to have sexual relations only with other Germans or 'Teutons'. Although at first intercourse was banned only with Slavs the directive made a basic distinction undoubtedly intended to prepare the way for a future ban on sexual relations between Germans and those of Latin, Baltic, or Celtic origin.
Heinrich Himmler, pages 594-595.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#24

Post by George L Gregory » 01 Apr 2021, 21:38

Frischluft wrote:
21 Mar 2021, 01:43
George L Gregory wrote:
21 Mar 2021, 01:18
What year was that copy of the Ahnenpass issued?
Issue #31 from 1937. This copy from 1944 mentions "German or species-related descent" but does not explain it: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... pdf&page=3.
Do you have any information about which ethnic groups living inside of Germany were considered to be of related blood? What about Poles? Polish people represented a considerable minority in some places in Germany. What about Danes? What about Turks? What about Brits?

You can post in German if you want. :D

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#25

Post by Frischluft » 05 Apr 2021, 02:40

George L Gregory wrote:
01 Apr 2021, 21:38
What about Poles? Polish people represented a considerable minority in some places in Germany. What about Danes? What about Turks? What about Brits?
The Poles, Danes, and Brits were considered to be of "related blood" because Hans F. K. Günther considered the Germans to be a mix of all "European races". In his popular-scientific, Nordicist book Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, he gave an estimation of the racial components of the German population in Europe (pp. 91–92):
  • 45-50% nordisch (Nordic)
  • 20% ostisch (Alpine)
  • 15% dinarisch (Dinaric)
  • 8% ostbaltisch (East-Baltic)
  • 5% fälisch (Phalian)
  • 2% westisch (Mediterranean)
  • 2% sudetisch (Sudetic) and innerasiatisch (Mongolian -> non-European)
The Rassenpolitisches Amt regarded the Turks as "a mix of Near Eastern-Oriental races with Mongolid racial components" (original German text).

Here is another relevant source:
So, when we speak of related blood, we mean the blood of those races that are determinative for the blood of the peoples who since time immemorial have a closed settlement area in Europe. Therefore, the members of the European peoples as well as their pure descendants in other parts of the world are essentially of related blood. However, one has to exclude the foreign-blooded, who can be found among every European people, such as the Jews and the human beings with a Negroid blood-impact.
artverwandt.jpg
Wilhelm Stuckart, 'Die völkische Grundordnung des deutschen Volkes', Deutsches Recht, vol. 5, no. 23/24, 15 December 1935, pp. 558-559.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#26

Post by George L Gregory » 07 Apr 2021, 15:43

Frischluft wrote:
05 Apr 2021, 02:40

The Rassenpolitisches Amt regarded the Turks as "a mix of Near Eastern-Oriental races with Mongolid racial components" (original German text).
Hi Frischluft,

The Nazis seemed to have changed their opinions about the Turks over time because they were considered Europeans and as Aryans.
In 1936 the government began an investigation to decide the racial status of the Turks, and the Turkish press announced the results in the press in the headline "The Turks are Aryans!"
Akbar Ahmed, Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity, pages 379-80.

Ahmed further quoted the Nazis:
In early 1942 the Propaganda Ministry's Anti-Semitic Action office was renamed Anti-Jewish Action. The Nazi physician Walter Groß, who headed the Office of Racial Policy, wrote, "National Socialist race theory in fact recognizes Arabs as members of a high-grade race, which looks back on a glorious and heroic history." In 1943 the Nazi Party stated explicitly that it accepted "followers of Islam" as members. Despite this, the Nazis were keen to avoid racial mixing— for example, between Germanic and Turkic peoples— and German officers were "instructed to explain to the 'Turkic peoples' that they were 'racially valuable' but that their 'bloodstream' was different from the Germans' and therefore mixing would have negative consequences for both sides."
Ibid.

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Re: "related blood" in documents

#27

Post by George L Gregory » 07 Apr 2021, 22:53

The Nazis even considered the Iranians to be Aryans.
The Nazis found a favorable climate amongst the Iranian elite to spread fascistic and racist propaganda. The Nazi propaganda machine advocated the (supposedly) common Aryan ancestry of "the two Nations." In order to further cultivate racist tendencies, in 1936 the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were 'pure-blooded' Aryans ... In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn among Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblance among these leaders.
And:
In 1936, the Nazi Office of Racial Politics, in response to a question from the German Foreign Ministry, classified non-Jewish Turks as Europeans, but "left unanswered the question of how to think about the obviously non-European Arabs, Persians, and Muslims." Later that year, ahead of the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis responded to questions from the Egyptians by saying that the Nuremberg racial laws did not apply to them, and after the Iranian ambassador to Berlin "assured German officials that 'there was no doubt that the Iranian, as an Aryan,' was 'racially kindred (artverwandt) with the Germans," the German Foreign Ministry "assured the Iranian Embassy in Berlin that the correct distinction between was not between "Aryans and non-Aryans" but rather between "persons of German and related blood on one hand and Jews as well as racially alien on the other."

Historian Jeffrey Herf writes:
As a result of the discussions of spring and summer 1936, Nazi officials had reassured Arab diplomats that Nazi ideology and policy were directed against the Jews, not non-Jewish Semites. Nazism viewed Arabs and Muslims as different but, in clear contrast to the racial hierarchy presented in Mein Kampf, not as racially inferior. But as it was best that races not mix, non-Jewish Germans should marry other non-Jewish Germans. These abstruse discussions of the meaning of blood and race in summer 1936 offered a legal and conceptual foundation for reconciling German racial ideology and legislation with close and ongoing work with non-Jewish Semites, that is, Arabs and Muslims, before and during World War II. As a consequence of the exchanges of spring and summer 1936 and the Egyptian and Iranian decisions to attend the summer Olympics, German officials learned that they could reconcile Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish policies with efforts to find allies among non-Jewish Semites. They also learned that at least some Arab and Persian diplomats had no principled opposition to anti-Semitism so long as it was only aimed at Jews and even had become accustomed to thinking about peoples and nations in the racist categories emerging from the National Socialist regime.

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