Determining ‘People of German Blood’, ‘Jews’ and ‘Mischlinge’: The Reich Kinship Office and the Competing Discourses and Powers of Nazism, 1941–1943
2006 ◽
Vol 15
(1)
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pp. 43-65
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Keyword(s):
This article conceptualises the dissemination by Nazi party and state institutions of racial categories of Germanness and Jewishness and the imposition of these categories on segments of the population as a form of linguistic violence. Centring on the Reich Kinship Office during the Second World War, the article argues that racial discourses were not static, but were constantly remade in the practices of the office's employees and their interaction with petitioners desperately seeking to escape persecution. The office's practices exemplify the competing discourses of Nazism, as employees saw the Kinship Office's discourses increasingly undermined by SS and police agencies and their growing power and more radical languages.