The Ahnenpass
1933 · Ancestry Proof Booklet · Work 699 of 1,871
A Protestant parish office in central Europe in 1933, on a dark oak table a heavy leather-bound church register of the eighteenth century lying open and soft in focus at a flat angle, in front of it a slim booklet of plain unmarked blue card, 13.5 by 20.5 centimetres, thread-sewn along the left edge, lying closed with its back cover up, beside it a stack of closed blue booklets seen from the fore-edge, a black tin ink pad box with its lid shut, the pastor's hands in black wool sleeves on the register, a shelf of leather spines behind, bare plastered walls painted pale grey, side light from a tall window on the left.
- What it was used for
- The Ahnenpass was a printed booklet in which Germans could document their ancestors. It was first demanded of civil servants: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933 introduced the so-called Aryan paragraph, and anyone staying in public employment had to prove their descent. Doctors and lawyers followed in the spring of 1933, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 extended the requirement to all citizens. Birth, marriage and death of each ancestor were entered, checked against a parish's church registers and confirmed by a registry office. The blank copy held by the Museum Wolmirstedt has 52 pages and forms for ancestors back to the fifth generation. The NSDAP required its members to document descent back to 1800.
- What was new
- What was new was that proof of descent became a condition of employment and marriage, and that it was given a printed booklet, sold by publishers, which could be officially certified. Yet the state's racial policy rested largely on books the state had not kept: the entries usually came from parish registers that clergymen had maintained over generations. The Deutsches Historisches Museum notes that the number of genealogists grew sharply.
What the sources leave open: The two museum objects consulted differ in dating and attribution: Museum Guntersblum records Franz Eher Nachfolger, Munich, as printer, 1934 to 1945, 48 pages (the Reichsverband der Standesbeamten as publisher from 1934 appears in a description marked as taken from Wikipedia). Museum Wolmirstedt names a private Dortmund publisher, 52 pages, and only "the 1930s". Several publishers and editions existed. No print run could be documented, nor who issued the first Ahnenpass.