The Nuremberg Laws were two pieces of legislation announced at the Nazi Party Rally on 15 September 1935 and passed unanimously by the Reichstag, which by then was a single-party assembly that did what it was told. They were the moment at which the racial doctrine of the Nazi movement became the law of the German state. From that point on, antisemitism in Germany was not the prejudice of a political party in power. It was the legal status of every person of Jewish ancestry in the country.
What the laws said
The first law was the Reich Citizenship Law. It established two classes of person under German law: Reich citizens, who were of German or related blood and held the full rights of citizenship, and state subjects, who held only the protection of the state. Jews were placed in the second category. They could not vote. They could not hold public office. They could not invoke any of the constitutional rights that had once applied to them as Germans. They were now resident strangers in the country of their birth.
The second law was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. It banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews. It banned sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews outside marriage, an offence that came to be called Rassenschande, race defilement, and was punished by imprisonment in a concentration camp. It banned Jews from employing non-Jewish German women under the age of 45 as domestic servants. And, in a clause that read as petty even by the standards of the period, it banned Jews from raising the German national flag or displaying the Reich colours.
The problem of definition
The laws had been drafted in haste over the few weeks before the Nuremberg rally and they contained a fundamental gap: they did not say who counted as a Jew. The Reich Interior Ministry had to fill the gap with supplementary decrees. The First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, issued on 14 November 1935, set the test that the regime would use for the next decade.
A person was a full Jew if at least three of their four grandparents had been members of the Jewish religious community, or if they had two Jewish grandparents and met one further criterion: being a member of the Jewish religious community themselves, being married to a Jew, being the offspring of a marriage to a Jew, or having been born of an extramarital relationship with a Jew. A person with two Jewish grandparents who met none of these criteria was a Mischling of the first degree. A person with one Jewish grandparent was a Mischling of the second degree. The two Mischling categories had different legal positions; broadly, a Mischling of the first degree was treated almost as a Jew and a Mischling of the second degree almost as a German.
The fact that the regime had to write three categories instead of one shows what happened when racial doctrine met real human families. Pure biological Jewishness did not exist. Jewish and non-Jewish Germans had been intermarrying for generations. The Nazi state ended up making distinctions that the men who wrote the original laws would have considered absurd: it had to issue thousands of certificates of exemption for individuals whose blood was technically Jewish but who were politically useful. Some senior Nazis quietly arranged certificates for their own friends, mistresses or relatives. The category of honorary Aryan, never an official term, was used in practice by the regime’s own bureaucracy.
What the laws did to ordinary Jewish lives
The immediate effect was social. A German Jew waking up on 16 September 1935 was suddenly not a citizen of the country in which they had been born and lived their whole life. They could not marry the person they loved if that person was not Jewish. They could not employ the housekeeper they had had for fifteen years if she was under 45. Their non-Jewish friends, even those who privately disagreed with the regime, now had to think twice about being seen with them. Mixed marriages came under particular pressure. Some couples divorced; some held on. The non-Jewish spouse, who was now legally outside the persecuted category, often became the one who kept the family functioning, queuing for rations, doing the shopping, fielding the bureaucracy.
Jewish veterans of the First World War received no exemption. The men who had won the Iron Cross fighting for the Kaiser were stripped of their citizenship along with everyone else. President Hindenburg had insisted in 1933 that veterans of the war be exempt from the early dismissals from the civil service. Hindenburg died in 1934, and with him the last political restraint on the regime. By 1935 even the surviving veterans were being told that their service had counted for nothing.
How the laws were extended
The Nuremberg Laws were not a final position. They were a starting point. Over the following four years, around 250 supplementary decrees and regulations were issued under their authority. Jews were progressively excluded from the cinemas, the theatres, the public swimming pools, the universities, the medical and dental professions, the legal profession, the press, the broadcasting industry, the public benches in the parks, the ration card system at full level, and eventually even the right to keep pets. Each new restriction tightened the noose. The cumulative effect was the social and economic destruction of German Jewry well before any deportation began.
Why the laws matter
The Nuremberg Laws were not an obscure technicality. They were the legal and conceptual foundation of everything that followed. The deportation lists, the gas chamber selections, the confiscation of property, the categories of Mischling that determined whether a German Jewish family member would be killed or spared, all rested on the system of definition the laws set up. When the killing began, it was the Nuremberg Laws that told the regime who its victims were. The laws also became a model for occupied countries and for German allies. The Italian Racial Laws of 1938, the Vichy Statut des Juifs of 1940, the Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation of the late 1930s and 1940s, all drew on the Nuremberg framework. Nuremberg was where the racial state was first put into law. Most of the rest of the regime’s career was an extension of that one act.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, HarperCollins, 1997
- Lothar Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich, Oldenbourg, 2001
- Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, Oxford University Press, 1998
- USHMM: The Nuremberg Race Laws