Sunday, January 5, 2025: 9:10 AM
Gramercy (Sheraton New York)
“I ask you for leniency [...] in order to make our children’s journey through life more joyful. [...] They find it extremely painful not to be able to participate in the building of the Reich to the extent that they feel, just because their grandfather had a Jewish mother.”
The Nuremberg laws (1935) racially defined the categories “Jews” and “Mixed breeds,” depriving their targets of citizenship rights and excluding them from German civil society. Yet, it included a clause stating, “The Führer and Reich Chancellor can grant exemptions.” Thus, under the Nazi regime, thousands of German citizens contested their racial categorization through legal means, using the Nazi state apparatus to change their status.
Scholars have demonstrated that while the Nazi regime was complex, unstable, and precarious, it was not incompatible with effective decision-making and execution. Civil servants were compelled to adapt to and negotiate with these rivalries and power struggles between administration and politics. They were granted room for maneuver and at times, successfully resisted Nazi demands; however, their collaboration assured the implementation of Nazi policies without much loss in the efficiency of the system.
Through a micro-historical analysis of petitions to the civil registry office in Berlin, this paper examines how petitioners learned to navigate and strategically use the systemic contradictions of Nazi categorization, as well as how civil servants—and their contingencies and practicalities—framed and justified their decisions. Through their decisions about who fits into Nazi racial categories, bureaucrats worked to fix hitherto fluid and multilayered understandings of “Germanness” and “Jewishness.” These cases are great lenses through which to illuminate the dynamics of racial categorization and to investigate how racial categories might acquire substance—be defined, reshaped, and possibly reified—at the ground level through an interactive process of local and regional bureaucrats’ decisions about ordinary citizens.
The Nuremberg laws (1935) racially defined the categories “Jews” and “Mixed breeds,” depriving their targets of citizenship rights and excluding them from German civil society. Yet, it included a clause stating, “The Führer and Reich Chancellor can grant exemptions.” Thus, under the Nazi regime, thousands of German citizens contested their racial categorization through legal means, using the Nazi state apparatus to change their status.
Scholars have demonstrated that while the Nazi regime was complex, unstable, and precarious, it was not incompatible with effective decision-making and execution. Civil servants were compelled to adapt to and negotiate with these rivalries and power struggles between administration and politics. They were granted room for maneuver and at times, successfully resisted Nazi demands; however, their collaboration assured the implementation of Nazi policies without much loss in the efficiency of the system.
Through a micro-historical analysis of petitions to the civil registry office in Berlin, this paper examines how petitioners learned to navigate and strategically use the systemic contradictions of Nazi categorization, as well as how civil servants—and their contingencies and practicalities—framed and justified their decisions. Through their decisions about who fits into Nazi racial categories, bureaucrats worked to fix hitherto fluid and multilayered understandings of “Germanness” and “Jewishness.” These cases are great lenses through which to illuminate the dynamics of racial categorization and to investigate how racial categories might acquire substance—be defined, reshaped, and possibly reified—at the ground level through an interactive process of local and regional bureaucrats’ decisions about ordinary citizens.
See more of: Navigating Nationalism through Pragmatism: Central European Actors in the First Half of the 20th Century
See more of: AHA Sessions
See more of: AHA Sessions
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