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.