The Nazi Ancestral Proof
Subtitle: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: November 30, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780253349453
Subjects: European history: from c 1900 -; Fascism & Nazism; Racism & racial discrimination; Inter-war period, 1918-1939; History; History - General History; History: World; Europe - Germany; Holocaust; Jewish - General; 20th century; Eugenics; Germany; Government policy; National socialism and genealogy; Race discrimination
Description: "How could Germans, inhabitants of the most scientifically advanced nation in the world in the early twentieth 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."--Jacket.