The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution | 
| Author: Eric Ehrenreich
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 357474
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 234
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.6 x 1
ISBN: 0253349451
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.531811
EAN: 9780253349453
ASIN: 0253349451
Publication Date: November 30, 2007
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Condition: 2007 hardcover; new; text pristine: crisp, clean,unmarked, unread; usually ships in 1 business day
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Product Description
"Ehrenreich's book carefully and clearly enumerates scientific racism's fallacies of logic. ... [His book shows that] although racist eugenics was less logically coherent than hereditary health eugenics, greater numbers of `racially acceptable' Germans appear to have been willing to accept racist eugenic doctrine in order to come to terms with their own failure to act in the face of their neighbors' suffering. In other words, Ehrenreich concludes that .... racial antisemitism was an indicator of what people sincerely hoped to be true. I find this thesis both terrifying and plausible. ... an extremely well-argued, insightful exposition of the institutionalization of racism in everyday life during the Third Reich." -- Peter Fritzsche, H-German author of Germans into Nazis (2008) How could Germans, inhabitants of the most scientifically advanced nation in the world in the early 20th century, have espoused the inherently unscientific racist doctrines put forward by the Nazi leadership? Eric Ehrenreich traces the widespread acceptance of Nazi policies requiring German individuals to prove their Aryan ancestry to the popularity of ideas about eugenics and racial science that were advanced in the late Imperial and Weimar periods by practitioners of genealogy and eugenics. After the enactment of Nazi racial laws in the 1930s, the Reich Genealogical Authority, employing professional genealogists, became the providers and arbiters of the ancestral proof. This is the first detailed study of the operation of the ancestral proof in the Third Reich and the link between Nazi racism and earlier German genealogical practices. The widespread acceptance of this racist ideology by ordinary Germans helped create the conditions for the Final Solution.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Enlightening July 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am fairly well read in twentieth century European history, and find that Ehrenreich's text covers an area rarely explored in depth--namely the Nazi's attempt to differentiate between "Aryans" and "alien races"-especially Jews. Their primary problem was that a portion of the Jews in Germany had been baptized into Christianity, demonstrated "Aryan" physical characteristics, had Germanic names, intermarried and (in some cases) had been conferred with aristocratic titles. Ehrenreich covers the various attempts to "weed out" the unwanted through geneological records and "biological investigations." The complicity of the various Churches and scientific communites is documented as well. This is a text book, but a relatively brief one, highly organized and enlivened with interesting case studies. If this an an area in which you have an interest or a healthy curiosity, you won't be disappointed.
 Knowledge extracted from primary historical sources April 17, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
In the first third of the twentieth century, Germany was the most technologically sophisticated and scientifically advanced nation in the world. How could such a nation have produced the Third Reich, the author asks. But before 1933 Germany was not the country where antisemitism has its deepest roots, and this book avoids contributing something to enlighten the causes of antisemitismus in general and in Germany in particular.
Up to now "race" has in many languages two meanings: First, it means a nation as a whole, second, it means a distinct human type with specific, hereditarily based physical and mental characteristics. In its first meaning, racial hygiene could be unterstood as synonymous with social hygiene, in its second, race was a term of physical anthropology. Leading Nazis were well aware of this ambiguity of the term race and played in words with this ambiguity.
Despite Jews were never a race in the sense of physical anthropology, anthropologists tried to discern Jews from non-Jews on the basis of racial characterics. The strongest part of this book by Ehrenrich is documenting this dissonance between racial scientific theory and racist practice. The author draws upon a rich body of original sources from German archives and publications. His knowledge of such sources is extraordinary exhaustive and his conclusions are of high originality.
In 1933 the democratically elected government of Germany institutionalized the racial ideology of the Nazi party. In the following years millions of Germans had do proof their "Aryan" descent. But because the Aryans were never a race, since 1935 The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between "Jews" (the name was now officially used in place of "non-Aryans") and "Germans. The German Blood Certificate (Deutschbluetigkeitserklaerung) was a document provided to those with partial Jewish heritage during the Second World War that allowed exemption from Germany's racial laws. Hitler insisted on reviewing each application personally. Thousands of soldiers exempted in such a way from the Nuremberg laws, served in the German Army (see Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story Of Nazi Racial Laws And Men Of Jewish Descent In The German Military (Modern War Studies))
However, even after 1935 in the language of the ordinary people, someone had "to prove his Aryan descent". It was not a proof belonging to a race, but a proof of genealogical descent from non-Jews.
 Another in a long line of books December 30, 2007
1 out of 26 found this review helpful
This is another in a long line of books that shed no new light on the unfortunate events of WWII. Not one I would make a must read to understand the Holocaust.
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