Rassenschande

Rassenschande (ˈʁasn̩ˌʃandə, "racial shame") or Blutschande (ˈbluːtˌʃandə "blood disgrace") was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later by anti-miscegenation laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between ethnic Germans (classified, together with most other western Europeans, as "Aryans") and non-Aryans, regardless of citizenship. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally; later, they were punished systematically and legally. In the course of the ensuing war years, sexual relations between Reichsdeutschen (ethnic Germans, regardless of place of birth) and millions of foreign Ostarbeitern ("workers from the East") forcibly brought to Germany were also legally forbidden. Concerted efforts were made to foment popular distaste for it. These laws were justified by Nazi racial ideology, which depicted Slavic people as Untermenschen. In addition, there was a practical reason behind the laws: prior to their enactment, Polish and Soviet women and girls working on German farms began having so many unwanted births that hundreds of special homes known as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte ("foster homes for foreign children") had to be created, in order to abort or kill the infants away from public view. Prior to the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler often blamed moral degradation on Rassenschande, or on "bastardization"—a way to assure his followers of his continuing antisemitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption. As early as 1924, Julius Streicher argued for the death penalty for Jews found guilty of having sexual relations with Gentiles. When the Nazis came to power, considerable clashes and infighting had stemmed from conflicting views on what constituted a Jew—anything from full Jewish background to one-sixteenth part Jewish blood were argued for—thus complicating the definition of the offense.

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Related concepts (16)

Nazism

Nazism (ˈnɑːtsɪzəm,_ˈnæt- ; also, Naziism -si.ɪzəm), the common name in English for National Socialism (Nationalsozialismus, natsi̯oˈnaːlzotsi̯aˌlɪsmʊs), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism (Hitlerfaschismus). The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space" and seized power in early 1933.

Mischling

Mischling (ˈmɪʃlɪŋ; "mix-ling"; plural: Mischlinge) was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder ("mixed children") was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.