Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Mischlinge“

In Nazi Germany, integration into the community of the Volk, or exclusion and persecution, were determined by the regime's categories. As legal historian Michael Stolleis has noted, this new National Socialist terminology “quick[ly] penetrat[ed] … into the old conceptual world” of German jurisprudence and the country's court system. In line with the prescriptions of the political leadership of the Hitler state, bureaucrats of the Justice and Interior Ministries in Berlin drafted novel legislation that, once issued as new laws, judges, state attorneys, and lawyers readily interpreted and put into practice. With the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the main racial designations evolved around a tripartite terminology of “full Jews [Volljuden],” “Jewish mixed breeds [Mischlinge],” and “persons of German and kindred blood.” In accordance with paragraph 5 of the first supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 1935, state authorities classified any descendant “from at least three grandparents who [we]re racially full Jews” as Jewish. Paragraph 3 defined Mischlinge of the first degree, introduced as a novel legal category, as Jewish Mischlinge with two grandparents “who [we]re racially full Jews.” The supplementary decrees did not explicitly delineate the term “person of German blood”, but the main commentary of the Nuremberg Laws loosely tied this term to the “German Volk” as a community comprised of six basic races, including the Nordic and East Baltic ones.

The National Socialist regime was, generally speaking, not interested in an outright levelling of social differentiation patterns, as they were present within the German society around 1933. On the contrary: old hierarchies were to be fought and new ones were to be established—both according to the Nazi administration’s social ideology and, deriving from it, its racial ideology. The Hitler-Jugend, the Nazi’s youth organization, can be subsumed under this conclusion. The following contribution takes a closer look at the particular fate of Jewish “Mischlinge,” classified as such by the Nazi regime, in order to explore the question as to what extent the phenomena of social inequality occurred in the Nazi youth organization and how it can be ordered in a systemized manner. Two difficult fields of research are being united here: on the one hand, there is the research field regarding the Hitler-Jugend that is hardly manageable, but shows desiderata; and on the other hand, the thus-far rarely consequently and systematically conducted analysis ofthe National Socialists’ repressive policies targeting the newly created population group of Jewish “Mischlinge” in Germany.