Oh! First, Wanda please share any stories you have with me. Second, I was so caught up with "Guess what there are still actual Nazi friends to this day ... some very powerful" that I forgot this "What I wish we could figure out is what 'race' really means. Because I know there were Jews who did not have 'Jewish features' and we're spared during the Holocaust. In the US, Jewish people are seen as white people to Black and Brown people. Heck. Birth certificates will still say, Hispanic White or Hispanic Black for Latinos."

As I said - I absolutely pass. I worked in a mixed workplace in downtown LA for over 6 years (and many others, obviously). The majority of white employees at this organization were Jewish (practicing, attending Temple). There were Black employees in program roles. My boss probably thought she hit the goldmine (I joke) because I and my other fundraising counterpart were both blonde and blue-eyed. The finance department were all Chinese, the head from Taiwan, the sub-employees from mainland China. So guess who was the "go-between" these departments and groups as well as the sole Spanish-speaker on many occasions?

Yes, me.

So, the Nazis spared NO ONE based on appearance. If you were recorded to have even a tiny amount of "tainted Jewish blood" you eventually ended up on a train to the camps. When that high school teacher of mine singled me out due to what was obvious to him, a Jewish surname, I looked into the situation and over time have learned more. There were many "Jew Catchers" but one of the most famous and hated was blonde, beautiful Stella Goldschlag. They would gain the confidence of Jewish people hiding out in big cities and then turn them in to the Gestapo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Goldschlag

It's a wonder there were not more of these Jew-catchers - Jewish people who purposely used their identity to locate, gain the trust of, then inform on Jews who were hiding out 1940-1944.

I didn't experience as much anti-Semitic prejudice from my first fiance's parents (they were German immigrants, young teens during WW2 - his mom starved in northern Germany, she said they were eating grass by the end of the war, his father was a famous photographer kidnapped off the street walking home from HS - he became one of the Nazi's color photographers) as I did from my 2nd fiance's mother the U.S. oil heiress.

I just saw that the first transport to Auschwitz was 997 teenaged girls. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/01/27/first-transport-jews-auschwitz-was-997-teenage-girls-few-survived/

I work with people from all over the world today. The wounds of this war are very deep. As to the racist/racial part of it, the Nazis broke race down into tiny details, all benefiting themselves. In the U.S. the justification for Black Africans being kidnapped, forced onto death ships, and brought to work for free was mentally, culturally, and socially justified by racism. The exact same racism that the Nazis used to put Jews and any others into a) forced slavery/labor - most of their military machines, built by slaves; b) concentration/death camps. It was to take their labor as slaves and to also eliminate ("the Final Solution") those of no use as laborers - take their homes, land, and what belongings they had, down to the gold in their teeth. That's what "gold" in many Jewish names means, too. "Gold" for jeweler which was a long time European Jewish profession. My Jewish grandfather was a jeweler but my family name is Glasband ("Glusband") who knows - everyone's name was changed at Ellis Island.