Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer

that had begun to search, probe, and exclude. 104
    Often enough the most unlikely cases surfaced to be caught in the bizarre but unrelenting bureaucratic process triggered by the new legislation. Thus, for the six following years, the April 7 law would create havoc in the life of one Karl Berthold, an employee of the social benefits office ( Versorgungsamt ) in Chemnitz, Saxony. 105 According to a June 17, 1933, letter sent from the Chemnitz office to the main social benefits office in Dresden, the “suspicion exists that he [Karl Berthold] is possibly of non-Aryan origin on his father’s side.” 106 The letter indicated that Berthold was most probably the illegitimate son of a Jewish circus “artiste,” Carl Blumenfeld, and of an Aryan mother who had died sixteen years earlier. On June 23 the Dresden office submitted the case to the Ministry of Labor, with the comment that unequivocal documentary proof was unavailable, that Berthold’s outward appearance did not dispel the suspicion of a non-Aryan origin, but that, on the other hand, the fact that he was raised in the house of his maternal grandfather “in a Christian, strongly militaristic-national spirit, worked in his favor, so that the characteristics of the non-Aryan race, in case he was burdened on his father’s side, would be compensated for by his upbringing.” 107
    On July 21 the Ministry of Labor forwarded Berthold’s file (which by then included seventeen appended documents) to the Ministry of the Interior with a request for speedy evaluation. On September 8, the ministry’s specialist for racial research, Achim Gercke, gave his opinion: Carl Blumenfeld’s paternity was confirmed, but Gercke could not avoid mentioning that, according to all available dates, Blumenfeld must have been only thirteen years old when Karl Berthold was conceived: “The impossibility of such a fact cannot be taken for granted,” Gercke wrote, “as among Jews sexual maturity comes earlier, and similar cases are known.” 108
    It did not take long for the main office in Dresden to be informed of Gercke’s computations and to do some simple arithmetic of its own. On September 26 the Dresden office wrote to the Ministry of Labor pointing out that, as Berthold had been born on March 23, 1890—when Blumenfeld was still under thirteen—the baby had to have been conceived “when the artist Carl Blumenfeld was only eleven and a half. It is difficult to assume,” the Dresden letter continued, “that a boy of eleven and a half could have fathered a child with a woman of twenty-five.” The Dresden office demanded that the obvious be recognized: Karl Berthold was not Carl Blumenfeld’s child. 109 Needless to say, that opinion was rejected.
    Berthold’s story, which with its ups and downs would continue to unfold until 1939, is in many ways a parable; it will reappear sporadically until the paradoxical decision that settled Berthold’s fate.
    As denunciations poured in, investigations came to be conducted at all levels of the civil service. It took Hitler’s personal intervention to put an end to an inquiry into the ancestry of Leo Killy, a member of the Reich Chancellery staff accused of being a full Jew. Killy’s family documents cleared him of any suspicion, at least in Hitler’s eyes. 110 The procedures varied: Fräulein M., who merely wished to marry a civil servant, wanted to be reassured about her Aryan ancestry, as her grandmother’s name, Goldmann, could raise some doubts. The examination was performed in Professor Otmar von Verschuer’s genetics department in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. One of the questions Verschuer’s specialists had to solve was: “Can Fräulein M. be described as a non-Aryan in the sense that she can be recognized as such by a layman on the basis of her mental attitude, her environment, or her outward appearance?” The “genetic examination,” based on photographs of Fräulein