Abstract
In his new book, Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria, historian Evan Burr Bukey has written a forceful analysis of the impact of Nazi policy both on Jews married to non-Jews and on what the Nazis termed Mischlinge, people of “mixed breed,” or partial Jewish ancestry, in Vienna between 1938 and 1945. An expert on popular response to Nazism in Austria after the Anschluss, the union of Austria with Nazi Germany in March 1938, Bukey here focuses on a particularly interesting group of people who complicated the Nazi racial division of society into Aryans and non-Aryans. In doing so, he reveals the extent to which Nazi administrators had to modify their own furious racism in the face of practical concerns as well as the ways that ordinary people coped with and even manipulated the racial system in order to survive. All over the Third Reich, almost 90 percent of all Jews married to non-Jews survived the Holocaust at home. In his book, Bukey reveals why this was possible in Vienna.
Vienna is a good place to study this issue. As home to 175,000 Jews, Vienna was the second largest Jewish community in the Third Reich after 1938. As elsewhere, several generations of assimilation had led to a relatively high intermarriage rate and a large number of people with Jewish ancestors, although, as Bukey reminds us, kinship networks between Jews and non-Jews were not as deep as in Germany proper because many of Vienna’s Jews were relatively recent immigrants who intermarried at a lower rate than elsewhere in Germany. In 1938, Jews in Vienna all at once suffered from the Nazi anti-Jewish measures that had been imposed gradually in Germany, implemented in Vienna with greater vehemence and accompanied by much local violence. As a result, a larger percentage of Viennese Jews fled the country than was true elsewhere in the Reich. In 1941–42, the Nazis deported the Jews who remained to ghettos in Poland, to Theresienstadt (and on to Auschwitz), or directly to the killing centers in the East. As elsewhere in Nazi Germany, most Jews married to non-Jews—5,564 at the end of 1942—survived the war at home.
Although it is not his focus, Bukey effectively summarizes the complexities of Nazi policy and inter-Nazi squabbles about intermarried Jews and Mischlinge. He carefully explains that although many leading Nazis like Reinhold Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Office for Security and a chief architect of the Holocaust, wanted both to deport all Jews married to non-Jews to the killing centers and to reclassify all “half-Jews” as Jews and then to deport them as well, in fact, the Nazis did neither, largely because of fears of civil unrest, that is, the protest of non-Jewish spouses and parents against the deportation of their loved ones. Not deporting such people was only a temporary expedient, not a policy, but intermarried Jews and their children benefitted. That does not mean that all were safe. In fact, in Vienna in particular, the Gestapo energetically picked up Jews married to non-Jews on infractions of anti-Jewish restrictions and then deported them. Still, 85–87 percent of Jews married to non-Jews survived, especially Jewish women married to gentile men, unions which the Nazis labeled “privileged mixed marriages,” because the Jewish wife did not have to wear the Yellow Star or move to a “Jew House.” Jewish men married to gentile women in “unprivileged mixed marriages” had to wear the star, live with their gentile wives in “Jew Houses,” do forced labor, and suffer great privation. They were also much more vulnerable to being picked up and deported.
Bukey focuses primarily on how Jews and gentiles coped with Nazi policy. He investigates two arenas that shed light on this issue: attempts to upgrade one’s “racial status” and thus to escape Nazi anti-Jewish measures and also divorce. For the first, he has analyzed 497 cases in which Mischlinge appealed to the bureaucracy or the courts to upgrade their status, or non-Jewish parents appealed to upgrade the status of their partially Jewish children. The Nuremberg Laws (racial laws) of 1935 had defined as Jewish anyone with four or three Jewish grandparents (by religion), regardless of what religion they did or did not practice. Mischlinge of the first degree were those with two Jewish grandparents. They were only considered Jews—and thus subject to the anti-Jewish restrictions—if they belonged to the Jewish community or had married a Jew. Mischlinge of the second degree—those with only one Jewish grandparent—were not Jews. Many Mischlinge of the first degree who had been classified as Jews, or their parents on their behalf, appealed to the authorities not to consider them as Jews and even to raise them to the status of those with “German blood.” In most of these cases, individuals claimed that the legal Jewish father was not the biological father at all. Rather, the individual was the product of adultery or a premarital liaison of the non-Jewish mother with a non-Jew.
These cases are extremely interesting. In the first place, they reveal the extent to which people manipulated the Nazi system for their own advantage. To be reclassified meant escape from onerous anti-Jewish restrictions (and later deportation). Often Jewish and non-Jewish spouses colluded to lie to the authorities so as to protect their children. Second, these cases tell us much about the Nazi bureaucracy itself and its internal tensions and disagreements, especially between the Schutzstafel (SS) and the Nazi Party officials on one hand and bureaucrats in the governmental ministries on the other, with the latter somewhat more lenient on issues of racial status than the former. Moreover, even in the Nazi racial state, many bureaucrats and jurists applied traditional rules of evidence and upheld the rule of law. Yet, Nazi racism pervaded the system, and the “biological examination” that considered nose length, cranial measurements, and so-called Jewish characteristics was central to the determination of racial status. More importantly, no one challenged the racial foundation on which the new laws rested. Still, 84 percent of the petitioners succeeded in upgrading their status, especially in cases in which illegitimate birth opened the door to the possibility of German blood. The racial categories were not as rigid as some Nazis might have liked.
Divorce proceedings provided Bukey with yet another lens for viewing how intermarried couples coped with Nazi persecution. The Nazis would have liked all such couples to divorce, but fearing the impact of such measures and the intense opposition of the Catholic church, they never actually required divorce. As in Germany itself, very few non-Jews married to Jews chose to divorce their spouses. They remained, in the words of Marion Kaplan who has studied the phenomenon in Germany, “steadfast” to their mates. This was true both of men, whose careers suffered if they had Jewish wives, and of women, who as members of “unprivileged mixed marriages” had to suffer privation, abuse, and social ostracism. Some of those who divorced did so to keep their jobs, to protect assets from Aryanization, or because they did not want to follow Jewish spouses into exile. But Bukey’s analysis of ninety-eight divorce cases reveals that the overwhelming majority of those who divorced Jewish spouses did so simply because Nazi marriage laws made divorce easier and thus enabled them to end long-troubled marriages. Whether they filed for a “no-fault” divorce after three years of legal separation, or under Section 37, which allowed for the dissolution of marriage if the petitioner could claim the marriage had been entered into in “error,” without one partner realizing that the other was racially Jewish, most of the petitioners had serious marital difficulties that long preceded 1938, although Nazi persecution may have exacerbated those difficulties. Those who divorced did so because they had bad marriages, not because they wanted to rid themselves of Jewish (or racially Jewish) partners. Moreover, only about 7 percent of intermarriages ended in divorce, about the same rate as in the Third Reich as a whole.
Bukey’s analysis of divorce and changing racial categories is insightful and helps us understand Nazi policy and life in the Third Reich. What Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria does not do is flesh out the lived experience of intermarried couples and of Mischlinge. To be sure, Bukey does indicate that these people were harassed, persecuted, and ostracized, and they lived in fear, especially once deportations began. Yet, he never explores how individuals felt, how they understood their situation. In Between Dignity and Despair, her magisterial study of Jewish life in Nazi Germany, Marion Kaplan used published and unpublished memoirs movingly to describe the pain, confusion, and “steadfastness” of intermarried couples, and the struggles of the Mischlinge. She limited her study to the “old Reich,” but one wonders if the situation was similar or different in Vienna. Surely Bukey could have used memoirs written by intermarried Viennese Jews and by Mischlinge to explore what it was like to suffer in Nazi Vienna and to ascertain the role of the Viennese environment and local anti-Semitism in their fate.
This book suffers from some technical problems as well. I found it both anachronistic and annoying that Bukey refers to Judaism as the “Hebrew” religion. Second, Bukey notes that Mischlinge who petitioned to elevate their status identified as Austrians or German Austrians, not as Jews. I am sure that is true, but to avoid being misleading, Bukey should have explained that Jews also identified as Germans or German Austrians (as well as Jews), at least before 1938. In his prologue, Bukey promises to explore issues of ethnic/religious and national identity, but he never does so. Finally, the background section of this book contains many errors of fact about the Jews of Vienna. Jewish immigration to Vienna began in earnest in the 1850s, not after 1867, and Jews came from Hungary as well as from Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia. Jews were not a “protected minority” in the late nineteenth century; they were emancipated citizens with equal rights. Jews were not oblivious to the prevailing anti-Semitism in the city, and they were not leading a “clannish existence in self-segregated neighborhoods” before World War I, even if they preferred living near fellow Jews. Bukey should also have provided a fuller explanation of civil marriage in interwar Austria and the extent of Jewish intermarriage in that period. Finally, there is some evidence of careless editing.
Despite these problems, Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria provides an important analysis of the complexities of the Nazi regime and the response of ordinary people to Nazi persecution.