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A well filled in Ahnenpass (ancestor passport) to a BDM (Bundes Deutsches Madel) Elisabeth Schroder,

The Ahnenpaß (literally, “ancestor passport“) documented the Aryan lineage of citizens of Nazi Germany. It was one of the forms of the Aryan certificate (Ariernachweis).

The term Aryan in this context was used in a sense widely accepted in scientific racism of the time, which assumed a Caucasian race which was sub-divided into Semitic, Hamitic and Aryan (Japhetic) subraces, the latter corresponding to the Indo-European language family; the Nazi ideology limited the category Aryan to certain subgroups, while excluding Slavs as non-Aryan. Nevertheless, the de facto primary objective was to create extensive profiling based on racial data.

The investigation for lineage was not obligatory as it was a major undertaking to research the original documents for birth and marriage. Many Nazi followers had already begun to research their lineage even before law required it (soon after the NSDAP took power on 30 January 1933).