My husband is half Jewish, I am not Jewish at all. His father is fully Jewish. His mother isn’t. We have a child also. That’s the biological stuff.
I know household stuff made a difference too, so here ‘s that: We all live together, including my father in law’s mother (so she’s Jewish too). Nothing really religious goes on besides great-grandma not eating pork. We do eat Jewish food like that Matzoh bread and low key participant in Jewish holidays, basically meaning we do it for fun and not really because it’s considered that important. Christmas and Easter is celebrated with the same attitude.
So what would have happened to us as a family? I know nothing good, but I mean specifically.
A lot of this will depend on the exact status of the family members and the whims of local officials. Depending on their specific grandparents your in-laws might individually be classified as Jewish or Mischling of the first or second degree. Your son may be Aryan or Mischling depending on how your Mother-in-law is categorized. Your casual recognition of Jewish holidays of course isn’t doing anyone any favors here.
After 1933 you are in a mixed blood marriage. Although such future marriages are banned, yours isn’t dissolved. It is however classified as a valid reason for a divorce, like adultery. You may want to strongly consider getting a divorce. The next decade-plus will be much easier for you (and maybe your kid) if you do. You won’t have to wear a Star of David. Your child may have to, depending on if they have participated in synagogue, or gone through a bar/bat mitzvah. Your kid is much better off if they have been baptized, and ideally gone through catechism. The sooner you get divorced the better off your kid will be. You’ll have a much better status as a single mother than in a mixed marriage. As a side note there were also degrees between different intermarried couples. There was a privileged intermarried class, but you won’t qualify for it, as it requires an Aryan husband and baptized kids.
Your initial problems in the 1930s are going to be primarily social. You’re going to suffer a lot of loss from prejudice. There’s a good chance you will lose your job and be removed from any social networks or professional associations. Once the war gets going the household will be getting Jewish rations, not Aryan rations.
Eventually your Jewish relatives (except your husband and kid) are likely to end up in the camps. Your marriage nominally should protect your husband, but a lot of local officials would pick up intermarried couples and put them in “protective custody.” These then tended to get mixed in with the general population. So there’s a chance that rather than protecting your husband, your marriage may condemn you to Auschwitz. By the late war (1944) Michlings and members of mixed marriages have a good chance of ending up in a Todt work battalion. So there’s a decent chance your husband gets drafted into a labor detail. Depending on your kid’s age and gender, the same may happen to them.
Come January 1945, the remaining protections for intermarried Jews are lifted. All are ordered to be deported (mostly to camps in the East). Due to late war transportation issues though, some 15,000 Jews remained in Germany at the end of the war. Some 2/3rds of these German Jewish survivors had been part of mixed marriages. So your marriage offers one of the better chances at survival possible for your husband. You and your kid are most likely to do better if you divorce your husband.
This was drawn primarily from Maximilian Strnad’s The Fortune of Survival – Intermarried German Jews in the Dying Breath of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’
How would this same situation apply to gypsies instead of Jews?