Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933 to 1945

Abstract

In the nineteenth-century imagination, miscegenation with "non-European" races, particularly Jews and blacks, who were deemed figures of pathological and deviant sexuality, was posited as a key source of the physical degeneration of the "European" individual, race, and nation. By the 1920s in Germany, even some progressive adherents of the new theories of eugenics had adopted similar notions, arguing that miscegenation led to a form of "species alienation" that caused the individual and nation to lose "life force" and biological fertility. Such concerns about intermarriage and miscegenation were to become a central ideological obsession among National Socialists, who even before the demise of the Weimar Republic began to issue calls for measures to prevent the sexual contamination of Aryan women and the birth of "mixed race" offspring. Indeed, fulminations against "race defilement" and the sullying of "Aryan maidens" featured prominently in Hitler's tract, Mein Kampf, and numerous other Nazi ideologists joined him in demanding an end to the mingling of races. 1 Thus, in their 1931 [End Page 131] annual convention, the organization of National Socialist physicians called for a prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Once in power, Nazi Party members immediately began to appeal to the new regime to enact legislation criminalizing relations between "German" women and Jews, suggesting that "attempted contact should be punished by stripping the woman of her German citizenship and turning her over to the work camp, and by sterilization in cases of actual physical contact. The German Volk will survive only if it immediately undertakes measures to remain racially pure in spirit and body." 2

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