Policing Ethnosexual Boundaries: Rassenschande Denunciations in Nazi Berlin

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: Culture and Conflict

Abstract

Right-wing ideologies across time and space have long emphasized sexual miscegenation as a threat, making sexuality a key site for the policing of racial boundaries. In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the “Law for the Preservation of German Blood and Honor,” an anti-miscegenation law, which criminalized interracial sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews and created the new crime of Rassenschande (racial defilement). Despite the Gestapo appearing to be omnipresent, the Nazi regime relied heavily on denunciations by ordinary Germans to enforce these laws. Building on a rich body of historical scholarship on denunciation, this study extends existing work on denouncers' motivations and social dynamics by examining Rassenschande denunciations in Berlin through the lens of victims' characteristics. Drawing on a newly constructed dataset of 742 Jewish individuals accused of Rassenschande in Berlin from 1935 to 1945, I present a detailed profile of those denounced, including both their individual characteristics as well as their neighborhood composition and political environments. I then compare these characteristics to those of a sample of 103,000 Jewish residents of Berlin who were not denounced. Using quantitative and spatial methods, I evaluate two sociological perspectives to analyze who was targeted by denunciation: marginalization and status transgression. By centering the denounced, this study examines how a person’s vulnerability to denunciation was shaped by individual characteristics as well as by their local social and political contexts. The findings present an important first step into understanding who was at risk for denunciation in Nazi Germany. The results suggests that marginalization and status transgression do not fully account for denunciation patterns, but they do reveal a spatial component to boundary enforcement.

Author

• Elena Marilin Amaya, University of California-Berkeley