Uncovering the Motives and Identities of Holocaust-Era Converts

The experiences of converts from Judaism to Christianity during the Holocaust is just now beginning to receive significant scholarly attention. Up until this point, most scholarship on this topic has narrowly focused on Jewish children who were baptized while hidden in convents, although there has been some more attention to adult strategic conversions in Hungary. Other scholarship that has taken a broader view has emphasized the Nazi racial conception of ‘Jewishness,’ arguing that individuals’ attempts to avoid Nazi/Fascist racial persecution by converting were ‘futile.’ In contrast, this article demonstrates that oral history testimonies present a wide range of convert identities and motivations, far beyond previous scholarly focuses. The article examines the identities and motivations of Holocaust-era converts who were born in Germany and Italy, drawing on oral history testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA). It introduces a four-part grouping, organized around when and why an individual considered converting, to demonstrate that not all converts were children, forced into baptism. Furthermore, informed by recent scholarship that questions the coherence of the Nazi understanding of ‘race,’ this paper demonstrates that some conversion experiences can be viewed as an effort to exert agency. Some converts attempted to take advantage of the inconsistencies in Nazi/Fascist racial policies as well as their fluid religious identities in order to save themselves and their families. This article contributes to a greater understanding of the diversity of Holocaust victim and survivor religious identities and challenges–and contributes to what the scholar Klaus Hödl has described as ‘the binary view of Jewish and non-Jewish relations.’.