The documentation of one’s ethnic belonging has been in history often a complicated task for bureaucracy, but also for historians. This article focuses on the documentation of the descendants from mixed families. The personal data of the people who resettled from Estonia to Germany in 1941 during the so-called Late-Resettlement are used as a source. Documentation practices in interwar Estonia and during the Late-Resettlement which took place already in the occupied Estonia are analyzed in order to answer the questions what the legal framework was, how systematic the practices were, and what were the reasons of these practices.

In interwar Estonia, the ethnicity obtained a significant legal meaning. On the one hand, the constitution guaranteed to every citizen the right to decide their ethnic belonging but on the other hand it was implicitly obligatory to belong to a certain ethnic group. Until 1930 the ethnicity was written also on the identity certificates. For the members from mixed families it was at the same time a problem but also an opportunity which the monoethnic families did not have. In everyday life, ethnicity was mostly related with school system which based on the idea of the right for a mother-­language school which in fact became a burden. However, mixed families had the right to choose the ethnicity of their children themselves and to send them to a preferable school when a school with the child’s declared mother-language did not exist. Although this situation shaped remarkably the documentation of children’s ethnicity, the latter was nevertheless not always related to the former. In 1934 a new decree about the principles of the determining of one’s ethnicity was adopted. From now on, the personal freedom to decide one’s own ethnicity was radically restricted. The new law affected both minors and adults.

During the Late-Resettlement in 1941 the decision of one’s ethnic belonging was mostly up to bureaucracy. However, people had the opportunity to influence the process with appropriate documents, which mostly were certificates from parishes but not official documents from interwar era. While the former helped to prove German origins, the latter contained often undesirable information. However, the documents of the spouses of mixed families show that their ethnic belonging in interwar era and during the Late-Resettlement were generally rather well aligned with each other at the same time when their children were during the resettlement almost consistently documented as Germans regardless of their earlier ethnicity. There was no written rule to do so, but it is possible that the officials of the Soviet Union wished to show that they had not allowed too many non-Germans to resettle. Later in Germany however, the German bureaucracy balanced between the racial standards and the need for new people in war conditions. Thus, almost all people from mixed families got the citizenship when they identified themselves as Germans, including these applicants neither of whose parents was German.