These are a series of posts from rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks, discussing the question of whether or not Magneto is Jewish (as opposed to Gypsy, which was claimed by the character Gabrielle Haller in X-Men Unlimited #2.). Our consensus is that he is, but I (Alara Rogers) was arguing that he may well have a Gypsy parent or grandparent, and this would not have prevented him from being persecuted as a Jew. Rivka Jacobs (Shiloh999@aol.com) thought this less likely. There are some quotes from other posters in here as well. From ix.netcom.com!visi.com!news-out.visi.com!chippy.visi.com!news-out.visi.com!feed1.news.erols.com!infeed1.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!152.163.199.19!portc03.blue.aol.com!newstf02.news.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail Sun Aug 31 20:52:55 1997 Path: ix.netcom.com!visi.com!news-out.visi.com!chippy.visi.com!news-out.visi.com!feed1.news.erols.com!infeed1.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!152.163.199.19!portc03.blue.aol.com!newstf02.news.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: shiloh999@aol.com (Shiloh999) Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks Subject: Re: Magneto a jew? Date: 1 Sep 1997 01:30:41 GMT Lines: 292 Message-ID: <19970901013001.VAA16685@ladder01.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com References: SnewsLanguage: English aleph@netcom.com (Aleph Press) wrote in message: >I agree. My major objection to the Gypsy theory is not that Magnus can't >possibly have Gypsy blood if he was persecuted as a Jew. Hell, if he had >a Gypsy mother and a Jewish father, or a Gypsy mother and a half-Jewish, >half-German father, not only would he be considered Jewish by he nazis >but he'd *not* be considered Jewish by the Israelis, who count Jewishness >through the female line. Magnus was able to enter Israel as a Jew, without papers, as a stateless, and homeless man, after Magda left him. He wasn't hiding there. He was an immigrant. The Israelis would have considered him a Jew by law, and by law (The Law of Return) would have let him into the country without a passport or any documents. The Israeli government accepted him as Jew when he first entered the country. Gabrielle Haller's speech in Unlimited #2 represents either an attempt to disassociate Magneto from the Jewish people by Haller herself, or by the Israeli government. But initially, the Israeli government must have identified Erik Lehnsherr as a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Magnus is also circumcised. This means his family identified somewhat with the Jewish religion and Jewish culture. In Europe before WWII, circumcision was not a routine medical procedure. It was performed as a religous ritual 8 days after the birth of a Jewish boy. The Nazis wouldn't have identified young Erik as Jewish otherwise. UNLESS, young Erik insisted, loudly and proudly, that he was a Jew, regardless of whether or not he was circumcised. Which means, he was from a family that identified itself as Jews. If Erik wasn't circimcised, and wasn't from a family that identified itself as Jewish, then why wouldn't he claim he was Polish or from some other ethnic group, and so give himself a much better chance to live? >My objection to Gypsy as his ethnic identity >comes from reading a book on Gypsy culture, which is so totally at odds >with Magnus' personality that I acn't believe *he* ever considered >himself ethnically Romany. The Romany value close familial connection >with large extended families, trickery of those outside the Romany, >loyalty only to those within, very strict role separation of males and >females, good stories over literal truth, and do not value education >highly (most are illiterate.) Magnus is not into trickery (and when he >employs it, it's as likely to be against mutants as otherwise), does not >form familial connections (he could have been taken in by Gypsies he was >totally unrelated to, if he were Romany by blood and ethnicity), values >education *very* highly, and whenever he references the Holocaust speaks >of Jews, not Gypsies. I agree with this. >2. If his mother was, and was outcast from her clan for marrying a gajo >(non-Gypsy), Magnus' family might have had no connection with Gypsy >ethnicity; however, technically in terms of blood Magnus would have much >claim to being Romany as anything else. Therefore the Israeli government >could call him a Gypsy with a straight face. As I said, based on the comic book references, and real-world facts, Magnus was recognized as a Jew by the Israeli government way before Haller gave her speech. And you are assuming that his mother, if Gypsy by birth, didn't convert to Judaism. Gypsies have often adopted the religion of the land they live in, and in several cases I've read about from 19th century Russia, intermarriage between Gypsies and Jews there meant nearly always, that the Gypsy spouse converted to Judaism. >If his father was Jewish by >ancestry and more or less agnostic or freethinking by choice, Magnus >wouldn't have considered himself terribly Jewish either, and Jewish law >would not have called him a Jew. But nazi law would have, and it would >have been Jews he was thrown in with. If magnus was an ethnic mixture >that was pretty much toally assimilated until the Holocaust, it would >help to explain why he shows no signs of having any ethnic heritage-- he >calls himself a mutant like that';s the only heritage he has. His culture >would have been mainstream German culture, the same culture that >condemned him to die. Not much for him to be proud of there. 1) We really have no way of knowing how religious Erik's father or mother were. But I think it's clear from the comic book references, that Erik after he became Magneto, identifed with being a Jew as well as a mutant. He wasn't religious, but he made the parallel at least three times, between the persecution of the Jews and modern MU mutants. 2) The Nazis had already determined what ethnic group he came from, or they wouldn't have lined up his *immediate family* next to open graves, and shot them down. 3.) Being assimilated into German culture, and being Jewish -- to Jews -- wasn't a problem. It was Germans who didn't get this. The Lehnsherrs could have been totally German, proudly German, patriotically German (living in Danzig), or even proudly Polish, if they originally came from Poland. And still be Jews. 4.) Magnus says, in UXM #199, "...Then, Lee, it was the Jews. My nightmare has ever been that tomorrow it will be Mutants." He says, in UXM #211, (as you already pointed out) "...NO! The horrors of my childhood, born again ... only this time, Mutants are the victims, instead of Jews." He says, in New Mutants #61, while kneeling over Doug Ramsey's body, " ... they are registering mutants ... like they once registered my people in Poland...!" Only Jews were registered in Poland. I think Magneto has consistently made reference to a Jewish past. >3. The infamous and improbable photographs in XMU #2 showing an adult >Magnus dressed as a Romany cannot possibly reflect his life before >Auschwitz, which is the implicaitn the text leaves, because he wasn't an >adult then. However, after escaping the camps, he and Magda- who, all >evidence indicates, *was* probably ethniclly Romany-- traveled through >some very harsh country while very weak in the middle of the winter. It >is entirely reasonable to assume that after they crossed into the Soviet >Union, they met up with gypsies, who took them in on the strength of >Magda's ethnicity. The educated and likely middle-class Magnus would not >have fit in any better here than he later did in the highlands of the >Soviet Union, byt he might have tried, for a while. This is a good theory. It is simple, and it fits into continuity without making all kinds of additional speculations. I just assumed that the picture of Erik in Unlimited #2 was taken when he and Magda lived in the Carpathian Mountain village. >A really good point. I never thought of that. I just always assumed >people would interpret it as white-blonde. I imagine (based on the value >he places on education, cultural opportunities such as opera, and hard >work, his general emphasis of sceince and rationality over superstition, >and, again, the lack of obvious ethnicity) magnus as belonging to a f>airly assimilated, middleclass or lower middle class family in a >suburban area I think we're taking those pictures too seriously. In fact, it was Alara who first told me, last year, I was taking that pictorial representation of the Lehnsherr family in New Mutants #49 too seriously. Who knows why Erik dreamed of himself with black hair? In the flashback sequences of UXM #344, he sees himself with dark and light-colored hair. My theory is, that Erik, not having mirrors around him, remembers himself as he saw some other young Jewish boys -- with dark hair. It's only this one dream, and one flashback panel from UXM #344, that we have to refer to. >: ... he's the desendent of an 18th (?) century pirate queen, so the >: viking stuff isn's that far out for him.)(This was revealed in a Scarlet >: Witch story in (I think) Marvel Comics Presents a few years back. Wanda's >: soul was thrown backwards in time into the body of one of her distant >: ancestors who turned out to be a pirate queen. When a local soceress >: traced the relationship between the two women Magnus was revealed as one of >: the pirate queen's decendents.) >Cool! Yes, cool! Doesn't mean that some Jewish Lehnsherr didn't marry a pirate queen back 200 years ago! (Whatever her ancestry might have been.) Good jumping off point for fanfic, also. Danzig was a major port, a member of the Hanseatic League. Could be some wealthy Lehnsherr (a "court Jew" perhaps) married this woman. Maybe she left him, not wanting to settle down in the wifely role, and abandoned her child or children, for this man to raise. >: ... In my Holocaust class it >: was stated there was a six-month break between the time the Nazis stopped >: shooting Jews and the opening of the first gas chambers. My question is, >: where did Magnus spend those six months? The soldiers who killed his >: family knew he survived the shooting; I find it highly unlikely that they >: would let him go and then recapture him later. The soldiers aren't stupid, >: after all; more than likely they saw the energy field Magnus produced to >: protect himself and figured out how he survived. I figure that the >: soldiers then took him to some Nazi scientests and let them see if they >: could get him to do it again. >This is a very cool theory. The implication I got from the text is that: Well, it is a convoluted theory, and unnecessary. Erik was sent to Auschwitz either from the beginning of the camp, in the summer of 1940, or, as Tilman Stieve believes, after the start of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. In neither case, is it necessary to fill in any blank spaces of time. If his family was from Danzig, then they were exiled with the rest of the Danziger Jews in 1939, and dumped in Central Poland. They stayed there a year until they were rounded up for some reason, and shot. If he was from some other country, like the Baltic States, then he was sent to Auschwitz after his family was shot in 1941. The gassings started at Chelmno (using gas van trucks) in late 1941. The first victims were Jews, and the Gypsies of Austria who had been confined to the Lodz ghetto. During this time, as far as I know, the Einsatzgruppen on the Russian Front were still executing Jews over open pits. "In September [1941] the number of Aktionen reached a peak, one-quarter of those carried out between July and December, claiming close to two hundred thousand victims, almost half the total number of victims during this period. The number of operations and victims then declined gradually until April 1942..." This from Leni Yahil's THE HOLOCAUST, page 269. Also, remember that the sick, the crippled, the handicapped, the mentally ill, were being gassed in gas-vans even before the war started. The first gassing trial run was conducted at Auschwitz on Sept 3, 1941, with nine hundred Russian POWs being killed. The gassing of transports of Jews and Gypsies started at Chelmno in December of 1941. >a. Magnus' family were shot *rather than* being sent to Auschwitz >b. His survival was sufficiently impressive to the Nazis, who saw it as >reflective of drive and determination, that they sent him on to the camp >rather than killing him > (note that there are two good reasons for possibly doing so. >While Magnus is very young at this point, far younger than people who >were allowed to enter Auschwitz alive usually were, his will to survive >might have marked him as potentially a very good laborer despite his >youth, and the reason any Jews were allowed to live at all was that the >Nazis needed them for slave labor. Yes, this is the only really viable answer. >Secondly, a *lot* of Nazis had >problems with Jews that looked Aryan-- it was difficult to demonize >people that basically looked like them-- and, given a good excuse *not* >to kill a fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy [who, if we don't assume hair dye, >had what would have looked like white-blonde hair] with Nordic [ie, >Aryan] features, the Nazis might well have chosen to spare his life out >of compassion. No, I have never read of any SS officer or soldier who spared a Jewish child for more than a short amount of time. You're talking about Auschwitz here, and the SS were the personnel. There were no attempts made to spare Jews because they looked Aryan. I don't know where people could have heard this or read this. Some Jews with blue eyes and blond hair were taken to Mengele, for experimentation. You have got to be kidding -- the universe of Auschwitz was so horrendous, that the Nazis thought of the Jews as totally non-human. They didn't see those children as human children. You could keep a *pet* child for a while, like you would adopt a stray cat or dog -- but eventually the child was killed with all the rest. I have done a LOT of reading about the Holocaust, and I've never heard of any death camp personnel having any compassion for their Jewish victims. Some for the Gypsy victims at Auschwitz -- Mengele like the Gypsies. But that didn't stop Mengele from shooting his favorite Gypsy children, when Himmler ordered him to in August of 1944. You miss the point of the Holocaust -- the Jews were "demonized" for no good reason whatsoever. They were just cast as the devils, the non-humans. It didn't matter what they looked like. They were *vermin* who had to be killed. To the SS working the death camps, it would be like thinking a rat is pretty, maybe it should be spared -- but no, it is vermin, and regrettably, it must be destroyed. >As for the energy field, it isn;t always visible, and might have been >interpreted as a trick of the light if it was. Yes, I don't think the Nazi guards saw Erik's powers actually work. I think you are right in your first theory -- when the SS guards saw Erik emerge from that grave, they were impressed with his strength, and figured he'd make a good slave worker. If this was late summer 1940, it would make sense to send him to Auschwitz, since the inmates were being used to add buildings to the camp, and expand it. >(Rivka explains this as being uncles, aunts, cousins, etc, many of whose >bodies magnus might have been responsible for carting to the crematoria. >This is a bit thin, though.) It also may, if written up correctly, >explain the discrepancy between the accounts stating Magneto did have >powers before the incident with his daughter, and the accounts stating he >did not (some of which contradiction Magneto himself has espoused.) Rivka thinks it's a good theory, not a thin one. But there are conflicting stories, from Magneto himself -- for example, he tells Storm in the X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover, that his parents and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. He tells a Nazi officer that he's hunted down in Wolverine #23, that his WIFE was murdered in Auschwitz. He tells his children, plus Crystal and the Vision, in Vision and the Scarlet Witch vol. 1, no. 4, that he used his powers during the war, to hurl back Nazi tanks. The fact that his family was machine-gunned over an open grave is attested to by Magneto after he awakens from his dream in New Mutants #49, in his dream in UXM #274, and by the narration of X-Men #1. UXM #344 confirmed this also. (But those were Joseph's memories, and Joseph might not be Magneto.) I think part of his family was machine-gunned with him when he was sent to Auschwitz, and another part of his family was sent to Auschwitz later, after he was a member of the Sonderkommando. I think it makes Magneto one of the most dramatically powerful characters in comics -- if he was the one who led his family to the gas chambers, and pulled their bodies from the heap of dead, and put them in the ovens with his own hands. Which family members, well -- His father seems to have died when they were first shot -- Magneto mentions hearing his father's voice. Whether or not his mother and sister were with them, is another matter. I think they were. I think, Magneto sometimes says things for effect -- like when he's talking to his children and meeting Luna for the first time. Or, when he's about to kill that Nazi in Wolverine #23. But his memories aren't clear about how many family members were with him when he was buried alive, in 1940 or 1941. (I hope no one fell asleep reading this) Rivka From ix.netcom.com!aleph Sun Aug 31 22:20:43 1997 Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks Path: ix.netcom.com!aleph From: aleph@netcom.com (Aleph Press) Subject: Re: Magneto a jew? Message-ID: Organization: Netcom On-Line Services X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] References: <19970901013001.VAA16685@ladder01.news.aol.com> Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 03:50:54 GMT Lines: 412 Sender: aleph@netcom20.netcom.com Shiloh999 (shiloh999@aol.com) wrote: Hi, Rivka! : Magnus was able to enter Israel as a Jew, without papers, as a stateless, : and homeless man, after Magda left him. He wasn't hiding there. He was an : immigrant. The Israelis would have considered him a Jew by law, and by law : (The Law of Return) would have let him into the country without a passport : or any documents. The Israeli government accepted him as Jew when he first : entered the country. Gabrielle Haller's speech in Unlimited #2 represents : either an attempt to disassociate Magneto from the Jewish people by Haller : herself, or by the Israeli government. But initially, the Israeli : government must have identified Erik Lehnsherr as a Jewish survivor of : Auschwitz. Good point. I wonder sometimes if it's possible that Magneto *himself* was responsible for the disinformation, just on the basis of general paranoia (in which case, however, the Erik Lehnsherr identity is another blind, and you'd think Xavier would have figured this out and stopped calling him Erik...) On the other hand, as a circumcised male with an Auschwitz tattoo, what other evidence would have have need to present? Once they had identified him as Erik Lehnsherr, they might be able to say, "no, he's not really a Jew, he's *really* a Gypsy. We were fooled because he *claimed* to be a Jew." Would they really have turned away anyone with that tattoo claiming to be Jewish? Note that, in fact, I do believe that Magneto was more or less self-identified as Jewish, and that there were a large number of reasons he's tossed out that identity, among them the belief that he's not human. But really, how Jewish did he need to be to get into Israel? : Magnus is also circumcised. This means his family identified somewhat with : the Jewish religion and Jewish culture. In Europe before WWII, circumcision : was not a routine medical procedure. It was performed as a religous ritual : 8 days after the birth of a Jewish boy. The Nazis wouldn't have identified : young Erik as Jewish otherwise. UNLESS, young Erik insisted, loudly and : proudly, that he was a Jew, regardless of whether or not he was : circumcised. Which means, he was from a family that identified itself as : Jews. If Erik wasn't circimcised, and wasn't from a family that identified : itself as Jewish, then why wouldn't he claim he was Polish or from some : other ethnic group, and so give himself a much better chance to live? Certainly. They must have identified enough with Jewish tradition to have him circumcised, or odds were he would never have been classified as Jewish (which he had to have been to be Sonderkommando.) They could have been relatively little involved with their Jewishness, however (rather like my family is Catholic, but except for an occasional Midnight Mass at Christmas, you'd never know it.) An interesting and totally unrelated question-- when Mutant Alpha regressed him to infancy, would that have undone the circumcision, and if so, did he have the surgery done again as an adult? Also, have we seen magneto's tattoo since his rebirth? : As I said, based on the comic book references, and real-world facts, : Magnus was recognized as a Jew by the Israeli government way before Haller : gave her speech. And you are assuming that his mother, if Gypsy by birth, : didn't convert to Judaism. Gypsies have often adopted the religion of the : land they live in, and in several cases I've read about from 19th century : Russia, intermarriage between Gypsies and Jews there meant nearly always, : that the Gypsy spouse converted to Judaism. You're probably right. But would she then have been considered Jewish enough to pass it on to her children? I really don't know; all I know on the subject comes from some very conservative practitioners who didn't believe in intermarriage even with conversion. And again, when the israeli government recognized Magnus as a Jew, they did not know he was Erik Lehnsherr, who there almost has to be *some* evidence for being Romany (they couldn't pull a cover-up like this without *some* evidence.) In theory, a man who'd been circumcised for medical reasons, who'd spent time in Auschwitz as a Jew solely on that evidence (and the Nazis would have pegged any circumcised male as a Jew), could have shown up in Israel with whatever degree of ID Magnus had (remember, he was either using fake papers or none at all, or he'd have been identified as Erik Lehnsherr years ago), claiming to be Jewish, and would have been allowed in on the strength of that evidence. Now, I don't for a moment believe that Magnus was really a circumcised Gypsy or some such nonsense-- he'd have gone to the Gypsies, not to Israel, if that were the case. But the fact that they identified him as a Jew and then later said he wasn't doesn't inherently prove that they were lying the second time, given that they learned his real name in the interim. : 1) We really have no way of knowing how religious Erik's father or mother : were. But I think it's clear from the comic book references, that Erik : after he became Magneto, identifed with being a Jew as well as a mutant. He : wasn't religious, but he made the parallel at least three times, between : the persecution of the Jews and modern MU mutants. Hmm. Also, he does say he believed in God as a boy. So if he was religious enough to "turn his back on God" (you don't turn your back on a God that was never remotely important in your life in the first place), that does argue he had some religious identification with a religion, most likely Judaism because of what else you said. : 2) The Nazis had already determined what ethnic group he came from, or : they wouldn't have lined up his *immediate family* next to open graves, and : shot them down. True enough, but even if he were himself a Mischling, having one Jewish parent, or even one Jewish grandparent, could have condemned the whole family. : 3.) Being assimilated into German culture, and being Jewish -- to Jews -- : wasn't a problem. It was Germans who didn't get this. The Lehnsherrs could : have been totally German, proudly German, patriotically German (living in : Danzig), or even proudly Polish, if they originally came from Poland. And : still be Jews. Good point. I'm basically trying to figure out why Magneto shows no sign whatsoever of religious or cultural identity even after he decides that yes, he's a human being after all. The only connection he has to Jewishness is the Holocaust (the expedition to the Holocaust Memorial with Kitty, caring for survivors in Israel.) Someone named Danny (forgot your last name if you're out there, Danny) posted that he'd like to see Magneto get in touch with his religion again. I think Magneto is too confirmed an atheist for this, but I'd love to see him make connections to the cultural identity of being a Jew. Perhaps, if we're very lucky and Marvel decides a. to get their heads out of their butts about the Gypsy thing abd b. to treat Joseph sensibly, we could see Joseph making these connections as he tries to reclaim what was good out of Magneto's life and memories, recognizing that Magnus' biggest problem was his distance from his own humanity and trying to restore his connections to his heritage. : 4.) Magnus says, in UXM #199, "...Then, Lee, it was the Jews. My nightmare : has ever been that tomorrow it will be Mutants." He says, in UXM #211, (as : you already pointed out) "...NO! The horrors of my childhood, born again : ... only this time, Mutants are the victims, instead of Jews." He says, in : New Mutants #61, while kneeling over Doug Ramsey's body, " ... they are : registering mutants ... like they once registered my people in Poland...!" : Only Jews were registered in Poland. I think Magneto has consistently : made reference to a Jewish past. And despite narrative blocks which try to claim otherwise, Magneto himself has never been shown to say or think anything reflective of a Gypsy identity. : This is a good theory. It is simple, and it fits into continuity without : making all kinds of additional speculations. I just assumed that the : picture of Erik in Unlimited #2 was taken when he and Magda lived in the : Carpathian Mountain village. Could be, but what's up with the earring then? (Of course, I still don't get what's up with the hair... okay, I could buy Joseph with long hair, but why is it AOA Magneto, Joseph and What If Magneto *all* have long hair? It's so not him!) : >A really good point. I never thought of that. I just always assumed : >people would interpret it as white-blonde. I imagine (based on the value : >he places on education, cultural opportunities such as opera, and hard : >work, his general emphasis of sceince and rationality over superstition, : >and, again, the lack of obvious ethnicity) magnus as belonging to a : f>airly assimilated, middleclass or lower middle class family in a : >suburban area : I think we're taking those pictures too seriously. In fact, it was Alara : who first told me, last year, I was taking that pictorial representation of : the Lehnsherr family in New Mutants #49 too seriously. Oh yeah. We all are. :-) But to be fair, we haven't got much else to go on. (For instance, my conviction that Magnus' sister was older comes solely from the art in that story.) The second version of the flashback doesn't show up anything as clearly. Who knows why Erik : dreamed of himself with black hair? In the flashback sequences of UXM #344, : he sees himself with dark and light-colored hair. My theory is, that Erik, : not having mirrors around him, remembers himself as he saw some other young : Jewish boys -- with dark hair. It's only this one dream, and one flashback : panel from UXM #344, that we have to refer to. Naah-- he had to have had mirrors. But dreams are funny things. We all interpret this flashback as if it's literal truth (because we have no other literal truth to go on), but hell, the whole thing could be symbolic, or parts of it could have happened and the rest was manufactured by his dreaming mind. Magneto has had "flashbacks" of himself fighting Nazis, which obviously never happened while the nazis were actually in power. He's an old guy, and his mind and memories have been messed with extensively. One fanfic writer assumed that the contradictions in Magneto's flashback were too difficult to deal with, decided the whole thing was a dream, and came up with an entirely different way for his sister to die. I wouldn't go that far, but we're *all* taking this way too seriously. :-) : Yes, cool! Doesn't mean that some Jewish Lehnsherr didn't marry a pirate : queen back 200 years ago! (Whatever her ancestry might have been.) Good : jumping off point for fanfic, also. Danzig was a major port, a member of : the Hanseatic League. Could be some wealthy Lehnsherr (a "court Jew" : perhaps) married this woman. Maybe she left him, not wanting to settle down : in the wifely role, and abandoned her child or children, for this man to raise. You don't think she was a Jewish pirate queen? :-) : >This is a very cool theory. The implication I got from the text is that: : Well, it is a convoluted theory, and unnecessary. Erik was sent to Although there is so far no text whatsoever to support it, I rather like fanfic theories involving the young Erik being an experimental subject of Nazi scientists. That's really why I like this theory. :-) : Auschwitz either from the beginning of the camp, in the summer of 1940, or, : as Tilman Stieve believes, after the start of Operation Barbarossa in the : summer of 1941. In neither case, is it necessary to fill in any blank : spaces of time. If his family was from Danzig, then they were exiled with : the rest of the Danziger Jews in 1939, and dumped in Central Poland. They : stayed there a year until they were rounded up for some reason, and shot. : If he was from some other country, like the Baltic States, then he was : sent to Auschwitz after his family was shot in 1941. The gassings started : at Chelmno (using gas van trucks) in late 1941. When did the gassings at Auschwitz start? : Also, remember that the sick, the crippled, the handicapped, the mentally : ill, were being gassed in gas-vans even before the war started. The first : gassing trial run was conducted at Auschwitz on Sept 3, 1941, with nine : hundred Russian POWs being killed. The gassing of transports of Jews and : Gypsies started at Chelmno in December of 1941. Oh, duh. I might have known you'd tell us later in the paragraph. :-) : >Secondly, a *lot* of Nazis had : >problems with Jews that looked Aryan-- it was difficult to demonize : >people that basically looked like them-- and, given a good excuse *not* : >to kill a fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy [who, if we don't assume hair dye, : >had what would have looked like white-blonde hair] with Nordic [ie, : >Aryan] features, the Nazis might well have chosen to spare his life out : >of compassion. : No, I have never read of any SS officer or soldier who spared a Jewish : child for more than a short amount of time. I don't think they would have spared him, either. Obviously they shot him. You're talking about Auschwitz : here, and the SS were the personnel. Actually, I'm talking about the death squads. According to something I read, Himmler had a great deal of concern that Aryans would accidentally be shot, and in one incident, a handful of blond, blue-eyed men might have been spared, except that they proudly announced that they were Jews and stood with the rest of their people to die. I will try to find a reference for this. There were no attempts made to spare : Jews because they looked Aryan. I don't know where people could have heard : this or read this. Not at Auschwitz, because you didn't make it to Auschwitz without it being pretty certain what you were. What I heard refers to the death squad killings, of the type that killed Magnus' family, out in the field. Some Jews with blue eyes and blond hair were taken to : Mengele, for experimentation. You have got to be kidding -- the universe of : Auschwitz was so horrendous, that the Nazis thought of the Jews as totally : non-human. They didn't see those children as human children. Or they tried very hard not to, because those were their orders and they were sheep following the herd. The things I've read indicate that there *were* a lot of people whose consciences ere bothered, at least at first, and particularly in cases where the victims looked Aryan. This doesn't make the Nazis any less evil or say anything positive about them-- whether you believe someone is totally inhuman and kill them for that, or you believe someone is a human being but you're killing them anyway because you were told to, you're still an evil monster who deserves to die. And in Auschwitz, there was enormous psychological pressure to totally dehumanize the captives. The men who stood up in front of the death squads and announced that they were Jews were allowed a tiny modicum of human dignity; the captives at Auschwitz were allowed none, and it's a common phenomenon that humans devalue other people who have no dignity (valuing them as less than human because they are dirty, unhealthy and ragged, overlooking the fact that thjose conditions are not their fault.) You could keep : a *pet* child for a while, like you would adopt a stray cat or dog -- but : eventually the child was killed with all the rest. I have done a LOT of : reading about the Holocaust, and I've never heard of any death camp : personnel having any compassion for their Jewish victims. Some for the : Gypsy victims at Auschwitz -- Mengele like the Gypsies. But that didn't : stop Mengele from shooting his favorite Gypsy children, when Himmler : ordered him to in August of 1944. I'm only trying to imagine why the death squad members allowed Erik to go on to Auschwitz. Once there, Erik might have caught on that his life depended on pretending that he was older than he was, and through a combination of lying about his age and sticking to his story, demonstrating endurance and willpower far beyond normal for his years, and possibly having a protector within the camp, managed to make it into the camp instead of being shot outright and then survived long enough to get the experience and connections he needed to keep from the selections. I don't think for a moment that anyone connected with camp hierarchy spared him for looking Aryan, although his insistence that he was 17 when he clearly wasn't might have amused some nazis enough to let him go on into the camps, figuring that he'd die quickly enough of the work. (In Martin Gilbert's "The Boys", recollections of people who were young during the Holocaust, one man describes seeing a fifteen-year-old who was claiming he was 18 beaten by guards who were trying to make him admit to his true age, obviously amused by the whole thing, and when he wouldn't admit it they let him into Auschwitz. A barely-pubescent Erik, too young to have come to his powers, would never have been able to realistically fake being 18, but the Nazis didn't seem to care all that much.) : You miss the point of the Holocaust -- the Jews were "demonized" for no : good reason whatsoever. They were just cast as the devils, the non-humans. : It didn't matter what they looked like. They were *vermin* who had to be : killed. To the SS working the death camps, it would be like thinking a rat : is pretty, maybe it should be spared -- but no, it is vermin, and : regrettably, it must be destroyed. I agree with you, but because the Jews were demonized through the use of stereotypes, which painted them as small, dark and swarthy, there might have been serious concern in the minds of death squad soldiers (who were out in the field, where everything is more ambiguous and less regimented than at Auschwitz, where evil was made bureacratic and banal) as to whether an intended victim actually *was* really Jewish. After all, it would be hard for them to credit a Jew with the virtues of endurance and fortitude sufficient to survive being shot and buried in a mass grave; they valued such traits, and they beleived Jews *had* no redeeming traits. So even though intellectually the boy was obviously a Jew or he wouldn't have been here, it might have been hard to ascribe to an Aryan-lookin child who'd performed such an impressive feat the full degree of the dehumanization they felt toward Jews. And even given that, they didn't let him go; they might have spared his life (no doubt with a rationalization that oh well, he'd be a good worker), but they certainly didn't free him. In years to come, Magneto seems ambivalent about the value of his survival; he's occasionlly evinced the attitued that the dead were the lucky ones at Auschwitz. : >As for the energy field, it isn;t always visible, and might have been : >interpreted as a trick of the light if it was. : Yes, I don't think the Nazi guards saw Erik's powers actually work. I : think you are right in your first theory -- when the SS guards saw Erik : emerge from that grave, they were impressed with his strength, and figured : he'd make a good slave worker. If this was late summer 1940, it would make : sense to send him to Auschwitz, since the inmates were being used to add : buildings to the camp, and expand it. Yes, but he was still a kid. I mean, that probably *was* their rationalization, and that's probably what he did when he got to the camps, but no matter how much strength and determination a 12-year-old has, he's still twelve. Even if he was big for his age, he couldn't have faked being older than 15. So I think there was some additional psychology going on there. But I don't think they saw his powers either. : Rivka thinks it's a good theory, not a thin one. But there are conflicting : stories, from Magneto himself -- for example, he tells Storm in the : X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover, that his parents and sister were murdered : in Auschwitz. He tells a Nazi officer that he's hunted down in Wolverine : #23, that his WIFE was murdered in Auschwitz. He tells his children, plus : Crystal and the Vision, in Vision and the Scarlet Witch vol. 1, no. 4, that : he used his powers during the war, to hurl back Nazi tanks. The fact that : his family was machine-gunned over an open grave is attested to by Magneto : after he awakens from his dream in New Mutants #49, in his dream in UXM : #274, and by the narration of X-Men #1. UXM #344 confirmed this also. (But : those were Joseph's memories, and Joseph might not be Magneto.) Even if Joseph is not Magneto, the odds that he, too, suffered in the Holocaust is so thin I think it makes more sense to say they *are* Magneto's memories, and we just aren't sure yet how Joseph got them. It is true that Magneto frequently says things that make no sense about his background. (Which, perhaps, might be where Gaby Haller got the idea that he learned in the camps that he was different-- Magnus might have told her so.) In fact, this behavior would make sense if he *were* Romany, where a good story is more important than the literal truth, and evokes as much emtional power. However, the rest of his behavior seems so at odds with Romany culture I'm not inclined to think that's where he picked it up-- rather, he seems to have a reflexive habit of inserting slight contradictions into his stories to make it more difficult for anyone to pin him down. If paranoia is his reason for the small contradictions, one wonders how he felt at being exposed as Erik Lehnsherr. In the AOA he seems to be comfotable with that name, but then, in the AOA he was much less emotionally isolated. : I think part of his family was machine-gunned with him when he was sent to : Auschwitz, and another part of his family was sent to Auschwitz later, : after he was a member of the Sonderkommando. I think it makes Magneto one : of the most dramatically powerful characters in comics -- if he was the one : who led his family to the gas chambers, and pulled their bodies from the : heap of dead, and put them in the ovens with his own hands. Which family : members, well -- Did the Sonderkommando actually lead the victims to the chambers? I got the impression the Nazis did that, and the Sonderkommando just transported the bodies afterward. However, it would certainly contribute to the massive guilt complexes he suffers from if he did. : His father seems to have died when they were first shot -- Magneto : mentions hearing his father's voice. Whether or not his mother and sister : were with them, is another matter. I think they were. I think, Magneto : sometimes says things for effect -- like when he's talking to his children : and meeting Luna for the first time. Or, when he's about to kill that Nazi : in Wolverine #23. But his memories aren't clear about how many family : members were with him when he was buried alive, in 1940 or 1941. Both flashbacks indicate it was both his parents and his sister (at least, it looks like she was there in the UXM #274 flashback.) But of course, as said before, these are dreams and might not represent literal reality. : (I hope no one fell asleep reading this) If they didn't with yours, they probably have with mine! :-) -- If blacks were supporting whites through their taxes, regardless of need or income, while whites sat back and insulted their intelligence and culture, we would call it racism. If women were supporting men through their taxes, regardless of need or income, while men called them lazy whining slackers, we would call it sexism. When it's the young and the old, we call it Social Security. -- Alara Rogers, Aleph Press aleph@netcom.com All Aleph Press stories are at http://www.mindspring.com/~alara/ajer. From ix.netcom.com!news.webspan.net!newsfeed1-hme1!newsfeed.internetmci.com!152.163.199.19!portc03.blue.aol.com!audrey02.news.aol.com!not-for-mail Thu Sep 4 11:00:12 1997 Path: ix.netcom.com!news.webspan.net!newsfeed1-hme1!newsfeed.internetmci.com!152.163.199.19!portc03.blue.aol.com!audrey02.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: shiloh999@aol.com (Shiloh999) Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks Subject: Re: Magneto a jew? Date: 4 Sep 1997 14:00:41 GMT Lines: 114 Message-ID: <19970904140001.KAA25634@ladder02.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder02.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com References: <340B60CB.32C5@mindspring.com> SnewsLanguage: English plainair@mindspring.com wrote in message: <340B60CB.32C5@mindspring.com> >The Nazis considered anyone who had a Jewish grandparent >to be a Jew, and the founders of Israel decided that >anyone Jewish enough to be killed by the Nazis was >Jewish enough to take refuge in Israel. Thus, the Law >of Return grants citizenship to anyone with a Jewish >grandparent. Well, I went and looked a few things up. So here's the facts -- posted for reference, since several of us (myself included) weren't clear on just who the Nazis thought *fully* Jewish. First, the Law of Return: The law was first passed in 1950, and it was very inclusive. But in 1962, a Israel Supreme Court decision riled the more religious and conservative Israelis, and David Ben Gurion's government voted an amendment to the Law. Now, a Jew was defined as being the child of a Jewish mother, etc. The more religious definition. But then, in 1970, another Supreme Court decision angered the Knesset -- which was more secular at the time -- and ANOTHER amendment was passed, this time allowing the spouses and children of Jews to enter Israel under the Law of Return, and said, a person could become a citizen of Israel if one grandparent was a Jew. (This is called the "grandparent" clause, and is very contraversial.) Every year, the religious right wing in Israel tries to repeal the "grandparent clause" -- but I don't think they've succeeded yet, this year. Anyway, that is a moot point. Because the Nazi racial laws did not regard one grandparent enough to consider someone a "full" Jew. Here is the Nuremberg Law that defined a Jew, in 1935. (The First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, dated Nov. 14, 1935.) From Raul Hilberg's THE DESTRUCTION OF EUROPEAN JEWS: "Everyone was defined as a Jew who (1) descended from at least three Jewish grandparents (full Jews and three-quarter Jews), or, (2) descended from two Jewish grandparents (half-Jews) and (a) belonged to the Jewish religious community on September 15, 1935, or joined the community on a subsequent date, or (b) was married to a Jewish person on September 15, 1935, or (c) was the offspring of a marriage contracted with a three-quarter of full Jew after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor had come into force (September 15, 1935), or (d) was the offspring of an extramarital relationshp wtih a three-quarter or a full Jew, and was born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936. For the determinaton of the grandparents, the presumption remained that the grandparent was Jewish if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community. "Defined *not* as a Jew but as an individual of "mixed Jewish blood" was (1) any person who descended from two Jewish grandparents (half-Jewish), but who (a) did *not* adhere (or adhered no longer) to the Jewish religion on September 15, 1935, and who did not join it at any subsequent time, and (b) was not married (or was married no longer) to a Jewish person on September 15, 1935, and who did not marry such a person at any subsequent time (such half-Jews were called Mischlinge of the first degree), and (2) any person descended from one Jewish grandparent (Mischling of the second degree). The designations "Mischling of the first degree" and "Mischling of the second degree" were not contained in the decree of November 14, 1935, but were added in a later ruling by the Ministry of Interior. "In practice, therefore, Losener [the doctor who wrote up most of the early anti-Jewish decrees for Hitler] had split the non-Aryans into two groups, Mischlinge and Jews. The Mischlinge were no longer subjected to the destruction process. They remained non-Aryan under the earlier decrees and continued to be affected by them, but subsequent measures were, on the whole, taken only against "Jews." Henceforth, the Mischlinge were left out." There was a lot of arguing, at different conferences, among the Nazi officials responsible for racial policy. But after finally agreeing that the Mischling of the first degree would be sterilized, and the Mischling of the second degree would be treated as Germans, but subject to certain restrictions, nothing further was done. As Hilburg says, "The upshot ... was that, after all their discussion and controversy, the Mishlinge were neither deported nor sterilized." "To be sure, the anti-Mischling restrictions were somewhat intensified." Hilberg adds. Mostly, it was like being a converso, or *Marrano* in Spain during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Throughout the greater Reich, and occupied countries, the Mischlinge could be deported if they ACTED or LOOKED Jewish. Otherwise, they were merely kept from certain jobs, and schools, etc. So, Erik Lehnsherr's family would have to have been full Jews, or at least, if one one his parents was Jewish, and the other not Jewish by birth, they would have been practicing the Jewish religion. Otherwise, they would NOT have been deported, they would not have been shot, they would not have been sent to Auschwitz. Erik would have been defined as Jewish by the Nazis, if (1) he had three to four grandparents who were Jewish, and (2) he had two grandparents who were Jewish AND his family was practicing the Jewish religion. The ONLY other POSSIBLE situation, would be, that three or four grandparents were Jews, but his family converted to Christianity, and they were deported racially as Jews anyway. This did happen to people. BUT, Erik would then have protested, I'm NOT a JEW. He wouldn't have been circumcised, and he would not have identified with Jews. Although this is a possibility, it is so strained and unfair, for Marvel to say that Magneto was really a *Christian Jew* that I can't see this ever happening. (I hope!) So, either all four of Erik's grandparents were Jewish. OR, one of Erik's grandparents could have been non-Jewish: i.e. Erik's mother could have been half-Jewish, or his father. OR, if one parent was Jewish and the other was born non-Jewish, the non-Jewish spouse converted to Judaism. This is the only way the Lehnsherr family would have been deported together in 1939 and 1940, or, rounded up and shot by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941. They had to have been Jews, by the Nazi definition of Jews. More details and discussion along these lines can be found on Alara's Magneto web-site: http://www.mindspring.com/~alara/magneto.html Rivka