The Nuremberg Laws, enacted on 15 September 1935 at the annual party rally, did two things. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship, reducing them to subjects without political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. Together they transformed Nazi racial ideology from a programme of harassment into a formal legal structure. The administrative infrastructure they created was later applied across occupied Europe to identify and deport Jews to the death camps.
Ideology made statute
The racial ideology that underpinned the laws rested on the premise that Jews and Germans constituted separate biological races, and that the mixing of those races was a biological and national catastrophe requiring legal prevention. This had been Nazi doctrine since the early 1920s. What the laws did in 1935 was translate that doctrine into the formal machinery of the German state. They were drafted in a matter of days, hastily, at Hitler’s personal direction, and the first drafts were criticised within the Interior Ministry for going too far. The versions that passed were somewhat narrower than early drafts, but the principle was established.
The laws required the definition of who was Jewish. The first supplementary decree, issued in November 1935, established a classification system. A person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew. A person with two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling of the first degree. A person with one Jewish grandparent was a Mischling of the second degree. Conversion to Christianity offered no protection: the laws defined Jewishness by descent, not by religion. This was the point at which ideology most clearly overrode the social reality it claimed to describe. Jewishness was not a biological fact that the laws uncovered; it was an administrative category that the laws created.
What they enabled
The immediate practical consequences were severe. Jews who had held German citizenship since birth now had no legal standing as citizens. They were excluded from public office, from the professions (separate earlier legislation had already removed most Jews from these), and from civic life. Mixed marriages already contracted entered a legal grey zone that the subsequent supplementary decrees progressively tightened.
The deeper consequence was the creation of a registration system. To enforce the Nuremberg Laws it was necessary to know who was Jewish, which required documentation of ancestry, which required the registration and cross-referencing of population records, Jewish community records, and church baptismal registers. This documentation infrastructure did not stay in Germany. When German forces occupied new territories, the Nuremberg Laws and the administrative systems they had generated were applied to the new Jewish populations. The classification system that had been created in September 1935 was the tool used in 1941 and 1942 to identify deportees across occupied Europe. The laws did not cause the Holocaust directly, but they built the machinery through which it was administered.
See also
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, 2003
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005
- Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Nazism 1919-1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, University of Exeter Press, 1984
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Nuremberg Race Laws, encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997