In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (review)

Who is a Jew? The question has divided Jews for millennia. For an assortment of malevolent reasons, defining a Jew has ominously plagued non-Jews. By the end of the nineteenth century, antisemitic pseudoscientists identified Jews as a "race"; blood would tell. The rise of genetics transformed the issue into a genetic matter, making Jewish qualities "inconvertible" or unchangeable and creating criteria for definition that differed from earlier ones. Answering the question presented itself as the first, perhaps central step in the Holocaust. Before annihilation, or expropriation, or expulsion, the target group had to be clearly and precisely classified. Thus, the so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935 laid the groundwork for what would follow in the next ten terrible years.

The legal and ideological contortions of the Third Reich fell to the Ministry of the Interior. After identifying "full Jews," the civil service included a complicated series of categories of Mischlinge, "partial Jews." Mischlinge of the second degree were persons descended from one Jewish grandparent; Mischlinge of the first degree, from two Jewish grandparents but not belonging to the religion; "full" Jews were those descended from at least two Jewish grandparents, and/or who belonged to the Jewish religion, and/or had married a Jew before September 15, 1935.

Tent set out to "expose the suffering . . . of a much overlooked victim group," the "half-Jews" and "quarter-Jews" (i–ii), prompted by a chance meeting with Werner Jentsch, a Mischling who had endured forced labor after serving in the Wehrmacht until 1941 when he was publicly humiliated with a dishonorable discharge. After discussing Raul Hilberg's classic work, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), and Noakes' more detailed examination of the surprisingly rapid intensification of the policy regarding Mischlinge, Tent turns to oral testimonies of Mischling survivors, almost all of whom remained in Germany after World War II.¹ Those tantalizingly truncated "case histories," woven into the historical account, bring the Mischlinge experiences to life and supplement the history of the war and an overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Tent scrutinizes in excruciating detail German records from offices of the Ministry of the Interior, the Party Chancellery, the SS, the Gestapo, and others.

Tent details Mischlinge Jews' rapidly intensifying isolation—in schools, occupations, and general society—itemizing the worsening living and social conditions that afflicted those who remained either voluntarily or who found themselves trapped. As he writes at least three times, there were 72,000 "half-Jews" and 40,000 "quarter" Jews (59, 100, 103), many, if not most of whom were teenagers or adolescents. Tent hypothesizes (again, repeatedly) that their "childhood experiences hardened into lifetime habits" and marked them forever (38, 100, 138). Driven by ideology, the policy nevertheless exemplified the arbitrariness of the regime—in school attendance, hiring practices, even membership in the Hitler Youth. Results of that randomness ranged from isolation, to poverty, humiliation, and even starvation.

The Mischlinge's reluctance to speak contrasts them with Jews who suffered in ghettos and camps. Yet, as Tent shows, the threat to their lives was immanent, and had the war continued much longer, they would have died. The "radical" Party elite, led by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, pressed for death from 1941 to 1945. Indeed, the Wannsee Conference may have had that singular purpose. One-third of the minutes of that meeting reports the debate between the SS and the Ministry of the Interior, represented by Wilhelm Stuckart, who argued for mass sterilization of the Mischlinge. The compromise, struck by the "moderates," rested upon whether "Jewish blood" had priority over "German blood" in the Mischlinge.² Tent demonstrates the consequences of such irrational theory one person at a time.

Not until two-thirds of the way through the book does the author address German Jewish assimilation (194). Nor does he inform us about the 600,000 German Jews prior to 1933, most of...