September 15 in History

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.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the most severe disruption of the world's financial system since the Great Depression. Its most dramatic moment came in September, when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, but the crisis spread far beyond one firm. It froze credit markets, toppled or crippled major banks on both sides of the Atlantic, and pushed much of the world into a deep recession. Estimates of the wealth lost vary widely, but figures in the trillions of dollars, often cited as around $10 trillion in stock market value alone, give a sense of the scale.

On 15 September 2008, Lehman Brothers, one of the largest investment banks in the United States, filed for bankruptcy protection after days of failed efforts to find a buyer or secure government support. It remains the largest bankruptcy filing in American history by assets. The collapse turned a worsening credit squeeze into a global panic and is widely treated as the defining moment of the 2008 financial crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression.