The girl that could not be named Esther. Winfried Seibert

undoubtedly has a right to a good German given name, and that German parents have the duty to start their children out in life equipped with such names... It can happen that the custom of pious Christian German parents to give a child a biblical name, and thus a sort of Hebrew name, may later lead to conflicts between child and parents. After all, the religious orientation of parents cannot be definitely assumed to be the orientation of the children, and certainly not when later in life the children learn to think differently about matters of faith.

      For the first time, the viewpoint of the child’s welfare is sounded, an approach that could serve several purposes and one which we will meet in the Supreme Court. You can’t help being impressed by the certainty with which the ideology of the future was foretold. The thousand-year Reich was well established in the minds of many even before the thousand years had begun.

      After these rather ponderous meditations by a retired registrar — to be sure, one with considerable influence on the activities of the registry office — the Berlin district court judge Dr. Boschan, also a longtime contributor to the Journal of Registry Office Affairs, took up the legal question. In mid-1936 he demanded a German-oriented giving of names, and inveighed against the danger of the German essence being infiltrated by foreign elements and the practice of half-hearted naming of children. ⁴⁴› Reference He wrote:

      According to the principles of the National Socialist state, which wants to create a true German homeland for its citizens, there must be a limit to the choice of foreign given names since the choice of foreign names is a purely capricious act. Legitimate grounds for the choice of a foreign name have not been demonstrated.

      In today’s Germany we must establish the following principle: German children receive German names; foreign children receive foreign names. If legitimate grounds are given, exceptions may be allowed.⁴⁵› Reference

      This statement did not go unchallenged. Another Berlin state court judge commented briefly on Judge Boschan’s principle with these words:

      These remarks may be relevant for future legislation. They should not be taken as the statement of current law; they certainly are not conceived as such.⁴⁶› Reference

      True, there was no legislation, but there was at any rate a directive from the Minister of the Interior on April 14, 1937, regarding the use of German given names.⁴⁷› Reference It was not published in any official ministerial journal but rather in the Journal of Registry Office Affairs. Despite its questionable status as an official regulation, it played a great role in future decisions. Here is the text in full:

      Children of Germans should basically receive only German names. However, not all Nordic names can be included as German names; insofar as concerns non-German names (e. g., Bjoern, Knut, Sven, Ragnhild, etc.), they are no more desirable than are other non-German names. On the other hand, names have been used in Germany for centuries that are originally of foreign origin but that are no longer regarded as foreign in the minds of the people and are indeed completely Germanized; these can continue to be used unreservedly (e. g., Hans, Johann, Peter, Julius, Elisabeth, Maria, Sophie, Charlotte, etc.). It serves the development of clan thinking to rely on previously used clan names . Very often, these will be Germanized names, which in the future will still indicate the origin of the clan in a specific German territory (e. g., Dierk, Meinert, Uwe, Wiebke, etc.).

      Should basically receive only German names is a phrase that permits exceptions. There was no legal basis for this ministerial recommendation, and a recommendation is all it was. Even the current Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior, referring to his own directive, wrote a good six months later:

      Special regulations regarding given names still do not exist. It has simply been determined that given names of German citizens are in principle to be entered in the German language in the civil registry, and that indecent, senseless, or ridiculous given names may not be used.⁴⁸› Reference

      Everything seemed so open and above-board. To our astonishment, we find in the middle of 1938 clear and disturbing references in the press to developments on the name front – the military expression seems quite appropriate here. The name question had taken on another dimension since the end of 1937. The echoes in the press served partly as a trial balloon for what was to come, and may have been meant as a warning to be read between the lines about this new development. It was especially Germany‘s most famous newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, that conspicuously followed the story of the naming question, and in the summer of 1938 published reports whose journalistic significance is hard to grasp for the modern reader.

      In Mein Kampf, Hitler had assigned this newspaper to the bourgeois democratic Jew papers, to the so-called intelligentsia press, which, as he expressed it, wrote for our intellectual demimonde. ⁴⁹› Reference By 1938, the Frankfurter Zeitung had long been without Jewish owners. In honor of the Fuehrer’s birthday the following year, ownership shares were to go as a present to the Eher Publishing House in Munich.⁵⁰› Reference It should not be forgotten that this newspaper, which Hitler and Goebbels repeatedly wanted to finish off, was important for the foreign policy image of the Third Reich because a certain distance was perceived between the regime and the paper.

      How far the editorial board could stand apart from the Nazis is not a question that can be answered here. In point of fact, there was no single editorial opinion.

      Be that as it may, during this period the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on three occasions about our topic, one that was probably only of remote interest to the average reader. Two of these cases were quite important and were reported on in a manner that was unusual and striking for that period. We should consider it possible that this constituted an effort to warn the alert reader at home and abroad of hidden signals indicating an otherwise little-known development. Such signals could warn people, but they could change nothing.

      In the Saturday edition of July 1, 1938, a short article entitled Restriction to Two Given Names ended with this sentence: Names of German origin are to be preferred. This was hardly anything more than the kind of signal mentioned above. The report itself was generally scanty. It was based on an article published in the Journal of Registry Office Affairs, by a Dr. Stoelzel, professor at the University of Marburg,⁵¹› Reference an article which could itself, however, be considered explosive. Stoelzel‘s relentless proposals went much further than the bureaucrats and even than the Reich Ministry of the Interior had dared.

      Stoelzel, also a frequent contributor to this journal, and its expert on questions of marital status, complained primarily that the new marital affairs law of 1937 had allowed an unlimited number of given names, and he took a stand for a limit of at the most two given names. He painted a dire picture of what misuse could be made of an unlimited set of names, and he then switched over to the question of which names conscientious registrars should allow, which names should be denied, and what attitude they should take regarding the current demand to encourage the choice of given names of Germanic origin. ⁵²› Reference

      Stoelzel’s concluding recommendation went much further: he advised for the sake of simplicity to allow parents no choice at all or at the most a very limited one. German parents should have a choice only among names on two lists. Any names not found on either of these lists would henceforth not be considered for German children – that is, banned. These points remained hidden from the readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, although this radical solution should have had greater publicity. After all, after about half a century of following this suggestion, German given names would have been reduced to a rudimentary inventory of scarcely more than a hundred, and for the rest of the Thousand Year Reich people would have had to resort to numbering their children instead!

      On Sunday, August 7, and the following Thursday, August 11, 1938, the Frankfurter Zeitung published two items under the title German and Jewish Given Names. The sources for these articles couldn’t have been more different. One came from a legal decision on names from the Prussian Supreme Court on Civil Matters of July 1, 1938; the other, from an article drawn from the magazine The New Folk, a publication of the Office for Racial Policy of the Nazi Party.

      In