Honorary Aryan

Honorary Aryan (German: Ehrenarier) is a term from Nazi Germany. It was a status granted by the Nazi Bureau of Race Research, or by other Nazi members, to certain individuals and groups of people—who were not generally considered to be biologically part of the Aryan race—which certified them as being honorarily part of the Aryan race. The prevalent explanation as to why the status of "honorary Aryan" was bestowed by the Nazis upon other non-Nordic—or even less exclusively, non-Indo-Iranian/European—peoples, is that the services of those peoples were deemed valuable to the German economy or war effort, or simply for other purely political reasons.

The status of Honorary Aryan was occasionally conferred to certain Jews out of pragmatic considerations during the Third Reich. For instance, Jews who had been decorated in World War I by providing military service for the German Empire and who had maintained their support thereafter were unofficially commemorated as "honorary Aryans" and subjected to comparatively less discrimination than most other Jews were.

The term was also sometimes ascribed to certain Jews for personal reasons. For instance, when Emil Maurice, an early member of the Nazi Party and founder of the SS, was later discovered to have had Jewish ancestors by Heinrich Himmler, he was almost expelled (along with other members of his family) from the SS (in accordance with the new racial purity rules for SS officers that Himmler himself had mandated after becoming Reichsführer-SS), but was pardoned after being informally declared an "honorary Aryan" by Adolf Hitler—a close associate, longtime friend, and fellow prisoner (in Landsberg) of his—who came to Maurice's defense, and compelled Himmler to make an exception for Maurice and his brothers, via a secret letter written on August 31, 1935.

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