In June 1935, Bertha and Bettina Moralat attended the national meeting of the Union of Germans Abroad (Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, VdA) in East Prussia. Upon returning to their Swabian hometown, as the two recalled in an interview almost seventy years later, the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer proclaimed that “[t]he children of the baptized Jew Moralat have participated in a VdA meeting. Jewish behavior [Judereien] like this must no longer take place in the future.” A local window display of the notoriously anti-Semitic Der Stürmer prominently featured this anti-Semitic slur. Its use of the phrase “baptized Jews” implied, in line with racial anti-Semitic thought, that converts would always remain Jews. “Judereien” also was a German-language word play on “pig's mess” (Sauereien), which reminded readers of “Jewish pig” (Judensau), a popular late medieval anti-Judaic image. As the children of a Protestant mother and a father who converted from Judaism to Catholicism, the two Protestant teenagers had little reason to feel different from their friends before 1933. Given their family's political conservatism, they had even initially welcomed the Hitler regime.

But as the only family in town known to have Jewish ancestors, the Moralats were soon identified as targets by the press and local Nazis. In the fall of 1935, the Nuremberg Racial Laws officially defined Bertha and Bettina as “Jewish mixed-breeds” (Jüdische Mischlinge), the descendants of one or, in their case, two “full-Jewish grandparents.