The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  “No one was a Nazi,” he said. “Everyone knew that Hitler had been a criminal from the start.” I asked him if his mother was a Nazi. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They had to be careful what they said in front of kids, because teachers would ask children to tell them if the parents said anything nasty about Hitler.” Mauch’s mother once told him about a day when the Führer made a televised speech. A neighbor came by afterward and asked accusingly if they had watched it. Mauch believed that his mother would not have told him that story if she was a Nazi herself, though she said her brother was. What about Mauch’s father? “I don’t think so,” said Mauch. “He was a very strict Catholic, from what I’ve heard. That wouldn’t probably go that well with being a Nazi.”

  By the time Mauch went to school, many pages in his biology textbooks had a blank sheet pasted over them. He was told later that these passages made the case for biological supremacy of the Aryan race. There was only one teacher, Mauch said, who “made it his job to teach us about what happened.” Mauch remembers that the man was young and angry, although he cannot remember his name. One day the teacher brought in an architectural plan for one of the concentration camps. He showed the students the killing rooms and explained that in one room, where they shot people in the neck, a perfectly located channel on the floor was designed to drain away the blood after they fell. “Now just imagine the draftsman sitting there creating these things,” the teacher told the children.

  “I still can’t comprehend how people could do that,” Mauch said.

  In 1960 Mauch was called up for service but instead of joining the army he fled Germany. He went to Australia but because he couldn’t speak English he initially spent time only with other Germans. It was “the first time I actually met Nazis,” he said. “They all agreed that Hitler was bad news and the Nazis did terrible things, but then they would find excuses and defend that behavior.” So Mauch distanced himself from them and felt bad about being German for many years.

  When he began to befriend the locals, Mauch was surprised to find that some Australians actively investigated their own genealogy. For him the pursuit had sinister undertones. Certainly his Einheitsfamilienstammbuch gave grist to the specific claims made by the critics of genealogy, as well as justifying their sense of panic. It wasn’t just the rich or the aspiring who cared about family history—the Nazis did as well.

  • • •

  The Einheitsfamilienstammbuch was created in the 1920s by the Reich Federation of German Civil Registrars, and it soon became standard legal proof of genealogy throughout the country. According to Eric Ehrenreich, whose book The Nazi Ancestral Proof is the most specific and detailed account of the Nazi bureaucratization of genealogy and race, the registrars were quite explicit in their hope that it would be “a good means of advertising the goals of eugenics.” Ehrenreich traced the origins of the Einheitsfamilienstammbuch and other documents like it to a period long before the Nazis came to power, when genealogists had significant social influence.

  As early as 1898 the German historian Ottokar Lorenz described genealogy as a bridge between history and science. He argued that historians should think more about heredity, and scientists should think more about genealogy. Before Lorenz the science of genealogy consisted of record collection and organization, but at around this time genealogical societies began engaging with doctors, researchers, and psychiatrists who were studying heredity.

  One of their first case studies was royal families, not because genealogists were slavishly drawn to power but for the obvious reason that aristocratic genealogies had all been worked out to a significant degree and because portraits existed of the principals by which at least some traits could be observed. Lorenz was professionally interested in the protruding jaw and lip that recurred over generations of the Habsburg family. He pointed out that the family’s habit of marrying close relatives made the trait even more likely to appear across generations.

  Family history was widely popular in Germany at the time, and in 1903 the Zentralstelle für deutsche Personen- und Familiengeschichte, the German Central Office for Family History, was formed. In 1908 the office made a formal commitment to collect genealogical information that would help psychiatrists and eugenicists understand “heredity, degeneration and regeneration.” The goal was to gather the current and ancestral genealogical records of the entire population, from the aristocracy through to the bourgeoisie, and even including the inhabitants of prisons and asylums.

  Here, as elsewhere, genealogy, heredity, and evolution were prime material in the grand exercise of science as public entertainment. The German Society for Racial Hygiene was founded in 1910 and in 1911 sponsored an exhibition in Dresden, a biological extravaganza that showed how cells worked and how hybrids were created. Family trees illustrated heredity, showing that musicality, “moral insanity,” and, more straightforwardly, night blindness could be passed down. Reflecting the growing communication between genealogists and the medical community, genealogists gave talks at the exhibition. Such was the intense mingling of the disciplines that genealogical manuals began to include essays about the use of family history in psychiatry and anthropology. At the same time psychiatrists were engaged in a discussion about how to standardize records of the family histories of their patients.

  As it did elsewhere, the combination of science and genealogy served as a way to unify the nation. Naturally, it wasn’t long before concerns about heredity and traits became entwined with concerns about disability and race. Indeed, genealogy came to stand at the crux of historical, scientific, and nationalist interests. As far as race was concerned, as genealogists became more preoccupied with racial groups and scientists became more interested in how evolution shaped people, they looked at the differences between not just families but entire populations. What happens when a population is isolated and doesn’t breed with others?

  Scientists searched for island groups and groups who intermarried and reproduced only with one another. In many cases they ended up studying native peoples who were under the yoke of colonial rulers with whom there was already a great deal of tension. As one historian observed: “For Swiss anthropologists, the most obvious isolated group to study were the inhabitants of the Swiss Alps. For Americans, Native American populations were among the most promising isolates. For Indian and British scientists, isolation was to be studied in the caste system.” One geneticist who was eager to explore racial purity and racial mixture said, “We have in the American Negro Population almost laboratory conditions for the study of the effects of racial crossing.”

  Anti-Semitism, in particular, was tightly linked to German genealogical activities, and as Ehrenreich writes, “The line between promoting the idea that distinct biological races existed and asserting that they were of differing value was extremely thin.” In Germany Jews, who were thought to be both racially pure and foreign, were seen as a useful target population for genetic and evolutionary studies, much like Darwin’s finches. Because so much conflict with and discrimination against Jews existed, scientists sought to explain social judgments with reference to heredity, not bigotry.

  In the 1920s it became a common practice for genealogists and other interested parties to establish which families had Jewish blood and then to publish lists of their names. In 1925 there was a call to create a special eugenics division of the civil registrar’s office that would record four to six generations of family history and biological information. From 1928 to 1932 eight volumes of The Jewish Influence and the German Universities were published by Achim Gercke, who headed the Genealogical Authority but later joined the university system. The volumes listed the names of faculty who were Jewish and part Jewish and even faculty who were married to Jews. At the same time genealogical journals increasingly called for measures like sterilization or worse to contain the threat of hereditary illness.

  In retrospect it is easy to assume that ideas about racial hygiene became popular with the rise of
the Nazis, but as Ehrenreich explains, “by the time the Nazis assumed power, virtually all of the basic components of their racist eugenic theory had already appeared in Weimar-era genealogical journals.” Indeed, the ancestral proof that Nazis began to require of German citizens would not have been possible without the formalization of genealogy that began in imperial Germany and continued through the Weimar era.

  Even before the Nazis were in government, party members had to demonstrate the purity of their Aryan blood. A party newspaper article argued: “Dogs and horses have family trees. Cattle are registered in herd books. This is the first condition to keeping the blood pure and will further yield a true Aryan foothold to the kinship group.” When they came to power in 1933, they created an enormous administrative apparatus to classify the racial purity or mixture of sixty million German citizens, defining the populace’s rights on that basis. “The interest in genealogy culminated under the Nazi regime when numerous eugenic databases were created,” writes historian Bernd Gausemeier, “and the right to live became virtually dependent on one’s family chart.”

  • • •

  From the early 1930s the daily tensions and demands related to establishing proof of ancestry increased and even began to attract the attention of the foreign press. In 1934 a report stated that the Reich’s minister of posts had directed all of his employees to produce evidence of Aryan descent. Earlier people had to prove they were Aryan only if there was doubt about their racial status. That same year Hitler’s government decreed that only Aryans could hold stalls at the upcoming Leipzig Fair and that all wares had to be German made. There was no restriction, however, on “Jewish attendees or other Non-Aryans”; anyone who wanted to buy German wares was free to do so.

  In 1935, in one of many articles about exclusions based on Aryan status, the New York Times reported that a young female clerk had been sentenced to four months in jail in Berlin for falsifying her grandfather’s birth certificate, which showed that he was Jewish. The girl had erased “Jewish” and written “Evangelical” because it had become necessary to provide proof of ancestry at her workplace in order to keep her job. Some jobs required the absence of Jewish blood from 1800 on.

  Nazi genealogy was not merely a way to bureaucratize the social categories that mattered to anti-Semites; it was an enormous social machine that reinforced, as well as recorded, the racism and eugenic ideals of the Nazis. Tens of millions of people were caught up in the documentary maelstrom. Each day Germans lined up at registrars and before other government representatives to produce documents establishing their ancestry. “Businesses gave away genealogical tables as marketing devices, much as present-day companies give away pens and calendars,” writes Ehrenreich. Accordingly, many benefited from the Reich’s preoccupation with ancestry, not just scientists and genealogists but also the gatekeepers of information, like civil registrars and churches. They saw their status rise and they profited through increased government funding and greater prestige. Genealogical magazines sold well, as did books with titles like How Do I Find My Ancestors: A Guide to Quick Proof of One’s Aryan Ancestry.

  For genealogists the new power was intoxicating. “For decades, kinship research was science’s Cinderella,” one wrote in 1936. “While other branches of learning were represented by university chairs, and encouraged by the state, people dismissed us with a pitying laugh. That has now changed thanks to the regime of Adolf Hitler. Today genealogy has tasks of state-level importance to fulfill.”

  In 1936 the Reich Federation of German Civil Registrars produced a new family passport, the Ahnenpass. Like the Einheitsfamilienstammbuch, it was a conveniently pocket-sized version of all of one’s genealogical information, and once officially stamped, it functioned as a legal document. Many millions were produced; private companies created more than twenty competing versions. The Reich was so enthusiastic about the Ahnenpass that the military high command and even the Office of the Führer’s Secretary promoted its use. One featured a quote from Hitler on its front page:

  There is only one most holy human right and that right is at the same time the holiest obligation that is to care that the blood remains pure and through the protection of the best of human kind the noble development of this essence to give the possibility of the development of this noble essence.

  In practice, many Germans were able to “prove” their Aryan ancestry by virtue of taking an oath. Local administrators certified individuals at their discretion, and the assumption was always that further proof would be provided once the war was over. Yet in the early part of the twentieth century there were many marriages between Jews and Aryans, and they all considered themselves German. Their children, who generally grew up to be Christian, thought of themselves as German too. Who knows what steps the Third Reich might have taken had everyone truly been forced to produce the details of his lineage?

  Hundreds of thousands of individuals who were unable to gain approval with just an oath had to deal in some way with the Reich’s Genealogical Authority. Ehrenreich combed through hundreds of wartime letters written by ordinary Germans pleading with the authority for a swift and favorable ruling. “No one knows my unbelievably heavy sorrow,” wrote a woman whose son wished to marry an Aryan woman. “Please leave me this little ray of hope,” wrote another. “I grasp so desperately at your help.”

  The research was a surreal experience for Ehrenreich, whose mother escaped Germany in 1939; his father survived the war but lost his two younger sisters and many other members of his family to the Nazis. From an early age Ehrenreich had been fascinated by the Holocaust: Why would someone want to kill all the Jews in the world? The letters that he read were housed in the German Federal Archives, the same site used by Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard during the war. During the day he would come across letters from racial experts who had lived in the neighborhood and at night walk past the houses they had lived in.

  By 1935 the Nazi government issued a law that prohibited marriage between the genetically healthy and “unhealthy.” In 1939 Adolf Hitler created the secret T4 program, in which thousands of disabled people, along with the economically unfortunate, “burdensome lives,” and “useless eaters,” were reclassified as “life unworthy of life.” In many ways it served as a pilot for the Nazi death camps.

  Initially the program took in only children. Parents were encouraged to send their disabled offspring to special centers for treatment. Once there the children were starved to death or injected with a lethal overdose. As the program grew, people who were already institutionalized because of schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, or other disorders were transferred to one of six killing centers by SS soldiers in white coats. There they were led into chambers disguised as showers and gassed to death. Their bodies were burned in specially installed ovens, and relatives were notified of the deaths and sent falsified death certificates. Somehow news of the program became public, and even in Nazi Germany people objected. Eventually a grassroots campaign forced its closure, but it continued in secret. More than two hundred thousand people were killed in the T4 program.

  When the war ended, Nazi genealogy and eugenics were finally put on trial. Hitler’s personal physician, Major General Karl Brandt, was apprehended and prosecuted at Nuremberg. He created a program that sent sick, disabled, aged, and “non-German” people to the gas chamber to be killed, murdered people for the sole purpose of harvesting their skulls for medical research, and conducted medical experimentation where victims were sterilized, operated on, poisoned, or exposed to diseases like smallpox or terrible conditions like extremely high altitude. Brandt’s defense included a copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. He specifically drew the court’s attention to the parts of the book where Grant advocated activities that the Nazis ended up carrying out:

  Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the ste
rilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.

  But Nazi eugenics did not just seek to eliminate the bad; they also sought to facilitate what they saw as the good.

  • • •

  Gisela Heidenreich’s father died on the Russian front, and while it was not unusual among her school friends to not have a father, her friends had photos of theirs, and they knew their fathers’ names. Heidenreich did not. Again, unlike her friends who were born locally in the small Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, Heidenreich was born in Norway. Her mother told her that in 1943, when she was pregnant, she had to work in a Lebensborn clinic in Oslo, which is where Heidenreich was born. Heidenreich had never heard the word “Lebensborn” before and assumed it was the name of the clinic.

  Still, she always felt there was something that she hadn’t been told. “You know, as a little child, there is something wrong, there is something weird, and you are feeling: There is something I want to ask. I want to know and the answer is . . . oh, what? No, there is nothing, it’s your imagination,” she told me.

  When she was thirteen a scandalous story made headlines in Germany, and a friend quietly passed her an article about Lebensborn clinics. It claimed they were actually brothels for SS soldiers. Heinrich Himmler had created a breeding program using women who, depending on the story, were either prostitutes or innocent Aryan girls who were raped by soldiers (presumably with good Aryan documentation). Oh, God, thought Heidenreich. Now I know why she never talked about my birth, why she never talked about my father.

  There was no one Heidenreich could ask about it. Her mother was a depressive, difficult woman who rarely laughed and shared little. She never even told Heidenreich about menstruation. “You cannot imagine how this society was. After the catastrophe of the so-called Third Reich, they were more and more withdrawn, even on the topic of sex,” Heidenreich told me. “So I could not ask her, ‘Is it true you were a whore?’ I just had to accept that I was the product of having been bred in this brothel. It was horrible.”