Nuremberg Laws Enacted
In September 1935, Nazi Germany enacted two laws that turned antisemitism into the formal basis of the state. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, known together as the Nuremberg Laws, stripped German Jews of citizenship and criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. They did not begin the persecution of Jews under Hitler, but they gave it a legal and racial framework that made later escalation easier. The Holocaust did not follow automatically from them, though they were a key step along the way.
Antisemitism in Germany long predated the Nazis, but after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 the regime moved quickly. Jews were pushed out of the civil service by the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, and a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses was staged. Local violence and harassment continued, and in the summer of 1935 party radicals pressed for firmer, centralized action. The laws were announced at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, where the Reichstag was summoned to a special session, and they appear to have been drafted in a rush over a very short period.
The Reich Citizenship Law created a distinction between "Reich citizens," who had to be of "German or related blood," and mere "nationals," a status that left Jews without political rights. The blood law banned marriages and extramarital relations between Jews and "Aryans" and restricted Jews from employing non-Jewish women under a certain age in their households. The laws did not at first define who counted as a Jew. A supplementary decree in November 1935 settled this largely by ancestry, using the religion of a person's grandparents rather than any biological test, which exposed the contradictions in the regime's claims about "race." It also created a category of "Mischlinge," or people of mixed ancestry, whose treatment was debated within the regime for years.
The consequences were wide-ranging. Jews lost legal protection and were increasingly excluded from professions, schools, and public life, while the definitions created a bureaucracy of ancestry certificates and registries. Further decrees tightened restrictions, and the violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938 marked a sharp escalation. Many Jews emigrated, though often only by surrendering most of their property and facing restrictive immigration policies abroad. After the outbreak of war in 1939, persecution became mass murder, culminating in the killing of about six million European Jews.
The Nuremberg Laws remain a stark example of how discrimination can be written into law and administered by ordinary officials. After the war, the original documents drew attention again, and their postwar history, including their eventual deposit in an American archive, has been the subject of public interest. They are studied today as a warning about the power of law to enable injustice.