THE PROBLEM OF INTERMARRIAGE IN THE THIRD REICH

In recent years, scholars of the Holocaust have devoted increasing attention to the plight of Jewish mixed families in Hitler's Germany. This is no coincidence. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, much was known about the confusing and contradictory guidelines issued by Nazi officials regarding intermarried couples, their offspring, and other Germans of partial Jewish ancestry. There was also widespread awareness of the fate of the famous wartime journalist, Jochen Klepper, who on 11 December 1942, committed suicide with his Jewish wife. But it was the publication of the voluminous secret diaries of Viktor Klemperer, hidden for decades in the German Democratic Republic, that brought worldwide attention to the suffering of a Jewish professor of Romance languages who survived the Third Reich with his Aryan wife in Dresden. Klemperer's evocative account of daily life under Hitler portrays the multifaceted, split-minded attitudes of ordinary Germans. More significantly, it provides a detailed, first-hand account of the overlooked experience of “those in between”: that is, intermarried couples and their partial Jewish offspring.

Contemporary scholarship has revealed that the Nazi regime approached the question of mixed marriages with hesitation and uncertainty. The primary reason was Hitler's fear of arousing social unrest among Aryan relatives, such as that which eventually erupted in the Rosenstrasse incident of February 1943, when hundreds of Berlin housewives took to the streets to protest the deportation of their Jewish husbands to Auschwitz.