G2G: Family tree evidence in 1940s Germany

Question

My German grandfather said that he had to produce a family tree to prove to the Nazi administration that he was of Aryan race. Does anyone know if such family trees were kept and if so where they are stored?

Comments

My German friend's family had to do the same thing.  However, for her family it was lost once family members were old enough to be pensioned off and, therefore, allowed to "the West".  Such things as their tree were left behind or confiscated at the border (I don't recall which).  More many years later, after the Fall of the Wall, there was no longer any evidence of their tree,

Hopefully not all families had this experience.  Maybe some other posters will have a better response for you.

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Thank you all for your replies. My mother remembered that the document had details of an ancestor who was a bishop and I was hoping to add this info to my family tree. I suspect that the document was discarded when the family fled from East to West Germany.

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Hello,

I am posting this only for additional information for future visitors to this post:

If Germans were a member of the SS (Schutzstaffel) and wanted to get married after joining the SS, they would have had to undergo an even harsher verification process. In this case one might likely find central records at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, if they survived.

Best regards,

Sven

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The custom seems to have been continued in West Germany after WWII. A few months ago I noticed among my mother's possessions a "Familien-Stammbuch" with information about my parents, my siblings, myself, copies of birth certificates and marriage certificates (all duly stamped with an official stamp). The last entry is from 1966, and after that it seems to have been forgotten --- I certainly have no recollection about it from my childhood. And yes, I consider myself lucky to have it, because there are things in it that I did *not* know, such as the baptism dates of my siblings.

Answer 1

These are called Ahnenpaß, or Ahnenpass (if you don’t have in ß character in the font you are using. They were a booklet of about 24 pages to fill out with your direct ancestors’ vital statistics and religion.

These were personal “documents,” and had to be produced in certain situations, and then were returned. All the entries had to be notarized to be valid. They were not collected in any central location.

In filling them out a person had to get official, certified copies, ie, legal copies, of birth/baptism and marriage records. You entered the data in the booklet, then took the booklet and the documents to be notarized.

Because of the racial nature and purpose these were often destroyed after the War, but of course, many do still exist. It is sometimes possible to buy them from vendors of Third Reich memorabilia.

If you are interested in the history around these, and Nazi racism in general, read Eric Ehrenreich’s book “The Nazi Ancestral Proof.” This was published in 2007 and may still be in print. This book developed out of Ehrenreich’s graduate dissertation, I believe.

You can also do a google search for Ahnenpaß and you will get a fair amount of information about them, along with images of the cover and interior pages.

Comments

My mother has the one her mother started.  It's the only record I have of that side of the family.  The family Bible was kept by one of my mother's cousins and has since disappeared.  

I'm considering uploading images from my grandmother's Ahnenpaß so that I can have some sort of a record to link to the respective profiles, but I'm never sure how such a thing will be accepted by others due to the nasty politics associated with them.

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Erik, I wouldn’t think it would be unacceptable to use these as a source. They are sources, after all, genealogical sources. I would have no reticence about you using them, the history notwithstanding.

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These were considered legal documents in occupied Germany (western zones) in the immediate post war period.

They should cite the parish and the register volume and record number (if there was one) or possibly the page. That is a legitimate citation. The image likely will have the Nazi regustrar's stamp or seal which may not be allowed in some countries.

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They were issued by the civil registrar's offices (Standesämter) and like all official German documents issued during the Third Reich bear stamps with the swastika. If you don't want to use them you would also have to refrain from using primary documents for birth, marriage and death during these years as they also have a swastika on them. By now we are hopefully at a point where the display of symbols is not automatically considered an endorsement. Even the German Wikipedia is publishing documents with the swastika even though German law outlaws the symbol. The law does allow an exception for art, research, and education.

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My grandmother never got the stamps, and the standard booklet that she had was also free from swastikas, so if that's the biggest concern I guess I can create a freespace profile and put the photos of the book contents on there over the next few days.

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Unfortunately, the stamps made it an official document certifying that the information is the same as in the original documents (birth, marriage, and  death records). In the absence of of official endorsement I would consider the information contained to be on the same level as any other family history needing to be supported by the original source material.

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Helmut, I completely agree with you and do think of it in that way.  Unfortunately, it's the only record I have for now.  If her record is correct then her family was in Schlesien for a long time and the surviving records from that area are not yet available online.  After the area was ceded to Poland after the war the new residents vandalized the grave markers (understandable considering their recent experiences) so even that record is lost too.  Hopefully, the church records were treated with a bit more dignity and will be shared eventually.

Answer 2

I think that they talked about it in this episode of the Generations project.

https://www.byutv.org/player/24bcc397-f1ae-4f1f-a5be-866f61a8d099/generations-project-ty

I can't watch it here. It's restricted."this content in unavailable in your region".

Comments

This is worth watching. It is really more about some learning about himself, and discovering his ancestry. It does touch on some of the topics in this discussion.

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Thanks David. If you use a VPN on your phone or PC, which I did, you can watch it.

Answer 3

An Ahnenpass was issued to the person requesting it and was based on original data from civil registries and church books, basically birth, marriage, and death dates. It was not a requirement to have one but there was considerable pressure to have one to show "Aryan" descent. It required data back through the great-grandparents of the bearer, only a few went further, mostly when data were easily accessible locally. As individual documents issued by the local civil registrars there is no central repository of these family trees, their fate depended a lot on whether people decided to get rid of them after the war or not. The exception is that for members of the SS, their information was collected by the "Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt" and are now archived at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde, Abteilung R. The remainder, of what is still available, is collected at Genealogy24, a German genealogy site.