The question, “How many ‘non-Aryans’ are there actually in Germany?” is one of the most frequent subjects of conversation in Germany today. According to the Nazi definition, the term ‘non-Aryan’ includes all those with at least one quarter of Jewish blood in them, that is, not only members of the Jewish faith, but also such as are not members of the religious community, as well as the descendants of mixed marriages down to the second generation. It is almost impossible to determine this figure with any degree of exactness, since official statistics only include those Jews who are actually members of the religious community. This latter figure probably amounts to only about 500,000. The larger, inclusive figure has been the subject of much speculation, and is commonly estimated at between two and three millions. Occasionally the figure of 8,000,000 is mentioned.
These figures appear to have no foundation in fact. In the first place, while mixed marriages have been very frequent in the ‘higher’ circles, such as university professors, the aristocracy, the land-owning classes, the world of literature and art, and even among the higher grades in the army, they have been very rare among the ‘lower’ classes. In the second place the great frequency of mixed marriages is only a phenomenon of the last few decades. And, thirdly, statistics show that mixed marriages are much less fertile than others. (The figures are an average of 0.5 children per mixed marriage as against 1.6 per ordinary marriage).
As has been said, an exact calculation is, in the circumstances, impossible, but it is not too difficult to work out a moderately accurate estimate. To do this only the last hundred years need to be considered, for the descendants of mixed marriages that took place before then will probably have considerably less than 25 percent of Jewish blood, as will the descendants of Jews that were baptized or left the religious community before then.
The total number of Jews who ceased to be members of the Jewish religious community in the years 1831-1932 is, as nearly as can be estimated, about 24,500, the number of mixed marriages during the same period, about 45,000. These figures do not take us much further, for they do not tell us how many out of this number, and how many descendants of theirs, are alive today. To achieve any accurate results, we should have to take into consideration the average length of life, the average age on leaving the Jewish community, the average frequency of marriage and finally the average number of children per marriage among this class. This fairly complicated method gives us the following results:
Number of Jews, living today, that have left the Jewish religious community… 15,370
Descendants in the first generation, alive today… 72,740
Descendants in the second generation, alive today… 46,200
Descendants in the third generation, alive today… 26,400
Total, roughly… 160,000
Adding to this number roughly 500,000 ‘official’ Jews, we get the sum total of about 660,000 ‘non-Aryans’ in the Nazi definition of the term, or, in other words, roughly 1 percent of the total population of Germany.
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A second good consequence of Nazi anti-Semitism is that the growth of mixed marriages in Central Europe has been interrupted. This “disease” had gained so much ground that it had destroyed the strength and purity of the Jewish stock. In Germany, Austria and the German parts of the surrounding countries a quarter to a third of the Jewish population had been lost through mixed marriages and baptism. Thanks to Hitler’s racial anti-Semitism, a healthy reaction has set in and this form of national suicide has been brought to a sudden end.
Jews themselves have again be-
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
