BERLIN'S RENEWED ASSAULT ON INTERMARRIED COUPLES AND THEIR OFFSPRING

On Tuesday, 2 June 1942, shortly before sunset, Viktor Klemperer attempted to make sense of a new torrent of anti-Jewish measures. In his now famous diary he wrote, “The choker is being pulled ever tighter; they are wearing us down with ever new tricks.” After enumerating thirty-one new decrees, he bemoaned his diet of “tiny amounts” of spinach and potatoes, adding that while his Aryan wife was still permitted to eat a plate of potatoes at restaurants, she, too, was losing weight. Three weeks later, he noted the deportation of a Jewish widow within weeks of the death of her prominent Aryan husband. On 13 July, Klemperer and his wife spent the afternoon with another intermarried couple who, although “privileged,” had suddenly grown anxious and worried. Subsequent entries recorded intensified squabbles and strains within mixed families, growing pressure on half-Jews, and rumors that “mixed marriages are to be forcibly dissolved.”

Although unaware of deliberations by decision makers in Berlin, Klemperer appears to have had a preternatural grasp of the endless debates that raged among officials of the Nazi Party, the SS, and the Ministry of the Interior over what it meant to be Jew. As we have already seen, Hitler himself was of several minds on the issue, partly because of his concern for civilian morale, partly for reasons of his own.