Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria (review)

Evan Burr Bukey, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas and the author of Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945 and Hitler's Home Town: Linz, Austria, 1908-1945, has turned his attention to the fate of mixed marriages in Vienna during the Anschluss era (1938-1945). Vienna is particularly important for this kind of study because its number—4,443 intermarried couples—was second only to Berlin's 5,919.

As is well known, one of the most perplexing issues the Nazis faced in carrying out their racial policies was that of defining who was a racial Jew. Despite their considerable effort, they were unable to find physical characteristics that could be found in all Jews. Consequently, they were forced into the absurd position of using religious status to define race. Even that policy created problems because of the large number of marriages that had taken place between Christians and Jews after the middle of the nineteenth century. Moreover, nearly 17,000 Viennese Jews dropped their formal affiliation with the Jewish Religious Community between 1919 and 1938.

These facts forced the Nazis to classify racial status based on the religion of grandparents who, in most cases, had been born in the middle of the nineteenth century, were when intermarriage and conversion were almost unknown. Having two Jewish grandparents and two who were Christian meant that one was classified as "half Jewish," unless the individual practiced Judaism; in this case he or she was counted as a full Jew. By contrast, people who had only one Jewish grandparent and did not practice Judaism were free to marry Aryans and pursue careers in either the private or the public sector with only minor restrictions.

Classifications were sometimes appealed. Ninety percent of the Jews who appealed their racial classification improved their status through genealogical evidence or physical examination. It is especially ironic, in view of the fact that the Nazis came to power on the crest of a conservative revolution, that they believed that being the child of an Aryan prostitute was vastly preferable to being the offspring of a married Jewish mother. Having an Aryan mother who had committed adultery was better than having a Jewish mother who had remained faithful (p. 54).

The issue of mixed marriage was so complicated that "in some respects, Nazi bureaucrats and decision makers expended more time and energy coping with [it] than they did seeking a 'final solution' to the Jewish question itself" (p. 2). Two-fifths of the discussion at the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942 was devoted to the issue of mixed marriages. There were numerous possible combinations of couples. However, the most "privileged" were those in which the husband was an "Aryan" with a partially Jewish wife and the children being raised as Christians. These individuals were not forced to wear the Star of David, move to inferior housing, or suffer reductions in food rations. The children could join Nazi youth organizations. In at least some cases they could lead almost normal lives. The most precarious combination involved a full Jewish husband and a non-Jewish wife whose offspring belonged to the Jewish community. These families were forced to live in isolated "Jew houses" and live on meager rations.

Until the last few months of the war, the Nazis refrained from seizing Jewish spouses and deporting them to concentration camps for fear of arousing public protest of the kind that had emerged when rumors about the euthanasia program circulated in Germany in 1940-41, and after the Rosenstrasse incident in Berlin in 1943, when hundreds of housewives publicly protested the deportation of their Jewish husbands to Auschwitz. To avoid arousing a similar public outcry, the Nazis attempted to persuade mixed couples to divorce, but they had only limited success. Jewish spouses had absolutely nothing to gain by divorce and everything to lose; the Roman Catholic Church was opposed to divorce under any circumstances. An impressive 93 percent of non-Jewish wives...