5. The Foreign Office
Attention: Under Secretary Luther
6. The Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
Attention: Gau Leader and Under Secretary Dr. Meyer
7. The Race and Settlement Main Office of the Reich Leader SS
Attention: SS Gruppenfuehrer Hofmann
Subject: Final solution [Endloesung] of the Jewish problem
1. The final solution of the Jewish problem presupposes a clear-cut and permanently applicable definition of the group of persons for whom the projected measures are to be initiated. Such a definition applies only when we desist from the beginning from including descendants of mixed marriages of the second degree in these measures. The measures for the final solution of the Jewish problem should extend only to full-blooded Jews and descendants of mixed marriages of the first degree, but should not apply to descendants of mixed marriages of the second degree.[354]
2. With regard to the treatment of Jewish descendants of mixed marriages of the first degree, I agree with the conception of the Reich Minister of the Interior which he expressed in his letter of 16 February 1942, to the effect that the prevention of propagation of these descendants of mixed marriages is to be preferred to their being thrown in with the Jews and evacuated. It follows therefrom that evacuation of those half-Jews who are no more capable of propagation, is excluded from the beginning. There is no national interest in dissolving the marriages between such half-Jews and a full-blooded German.
Those half-Jews who are capable of propagation should be given the choice to submit to sterilization or to be evacuated in the same manner as Jews. In the case of sterilization, as well as in that of evacuation of the half-Jew, the German-blooded partner will have to be given the opportunity to effect the dissolution of the marriage. I see no objection to the German partner’s obtaining the possibility of divorcing his or her sterilized or evacuated partner in a simplified procedure without [having to observe] the limitation of article 53 of the marriage law.