“Privileged Victims: Nazi Germany’s Persecution of Intermarried Jewish-Gentile Couples and Their ‘Mixed’ Children”

To the alarm of the Nazis and like-minded antisemites, by the early 1930s intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews had become increasingly common in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Once in power, however, the Nazis exempted intermarried Jews in Central Europe from some repressive measures and delayed their deportation till the last months of the war. Nonetheless, non-Jewish spouses faced intense pressure to divorce, while so-called mixed children were ostracized and even sent alone to ghettos and camps. In his lecture, Professor Benjamin Frommer of Northwestern University, will discuss the development of Nazi policies towards Jewish-Gentile intermarriage in Central Europe and the responses of mixed families to persecution.

Benjamin Frommer, Associate Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University, is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia and co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes. He served as the Inaugural Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and has been awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence. His current book project, The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, examines the wartime destruction of one of the world's most integrated and intermarried Jewish communities.