Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws introduced in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935 at a special session of the Reichstag during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The legislation comprised two measures. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45. The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to people of "German or related blood", reducing others to state subjects without full rights.
A supplementary decree issued on 14 November 1935 defined who was legally considered Jewish and brought the Reich Citizenship Law into effect. On 26 November, further regulations extended the measures to “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards”, classifying them with Jews as "enemies of the race-based state".
To avoid international criticism, prosecutions under the laws were delayed until after the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The enactment followed earlier antisemitic policies of the regime. In 1933, Hitler's government declared a boycott of Jewish businesses, excluded Jews and other so-called "non-Aryans" from public service through the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, and organised book burnings of works by Jewish and other authors. Jewish citizens were increasingly subjected to harassment, violence, and loss of rights.
The Nuremberg Laws severely damaged the Jewish community's social and economic position. People convicted of violating the marriage laws were imprisoned and, from March 1938, often re-arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Social and commercial contact between Jews and non-Jews declined, and many Jewish-owned businesses closed. Jews were excluded from civil service posts and regulated professions such as medicine and teaching, forcing many into menial work. Emigration was obstructed by the Reich Flight Tax, which seized up to 90 per cent of a person's assets. By 1938, few countries were willing to accept Jewish refugees. Plans for mass resettlement, such as the Madagascar Plan, failed, and from 1941 the regime began the Final Solution, the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews.
Background
The Nazi Party was one of several far-right political parties which were active in Germany after the end of the First World War. The party platform included removal of the Weimar Republic, rejection of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum for Germanic peoples, formation of a Volksgemeinschaft based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.While he was imprisoned in 1924 after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his deputy, Rudolf Hess. The book is an autobiography and exposition of Hitler's ideology in which he laid out his plans for transforming German society into one based on race. In it, he outlined his belief in Jewish Bolshevism, a conspiracy theory that posited the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination in which the Jews were the mortal enemy of the German people. Throughout his life, Hitler never wavered in his worldview as expounded in Mein Kampf. The Nazi Party advocated the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft with the aim of uniting all Germans as national comrades, whilst excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or of a foreign race.
Nazi Germany
intensified after the Nazis came into power; a month-long series of attacks by members of the Sturmabteilung on Jewish businesses, synagogues, and members of the legal profession followed. On 21 March 1933, former U.S. congressman William W. Cohen, at a meeting of the executive advisory committee of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, urged a strict boycott against all German goods. Later that month, a worldwide boycott of German goods was declared, with the support of several prominent Jewish organisations. In response, Hitler declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933. By that time, many people who were not Nazi Party members were advocating the segregation of Jews from the rest of German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practice. It also barred Jews from teaching at universities. In 1934, the Nazi Party published a pamphlet titled "Warum Arierparagraph?", which summarised the perceived need for the law. As part of the drive to remove what the Nazis called "Jewish influence" from cultural life, members of the National Socialist Student League removed from libraries any books considered un-German, and a nationwide book burning was held on 10 May. Violence and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. Legislation passed in July 1933 stripped naturalised German Jews of their citizenship, creating a legal basis for recent immigrants to be deported. Many towns posted signs forbidding entry to Jews. Throughout 1933 and 1934, Jewish businesses were denied access to markets, they were forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and they were deprived of access to government contracts. Citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks.Other laws which were promulgated during this period included the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which called for the compulsory sterilisation of people with a range of hereditary, physical, and mental illnesses. Under the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, habitual criminals were forced to undergo sterilisation as well. This law was also used to force the incarceration in prison or Nazi concentration camps of "social misfits" such as the chronically unemployed, prostitutes, beggars, alcoholics, homeless vagrants, Black people, and Romani.
Reich Gypsy Law
The Central Office for Combatting Gypsies was established in 1929, under the Weimar Republic. In December 1938 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued an order for "combatting the Gypsy plague". Romani people were to be categorised in terms of their Roma ancestry as a racial characteristic, rather than in terms of their previous characterisation as an anti-social element of society. This work was advanced by Robert Ritter of the Racial Hygiene and Population unit of the Ministry of Health, who by 1942, had produced a scale of ZM+, ZM of the first and second degree, and ZM- to reflect an individual's decreasing level of Romani ancestry. This classification meant that one could be classified as Roma and subject to anti-Roma legislation based on having two Roma great-great-grandparents. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the "Gypsy problem" could not be dealt with by forced resettlement or imprisonment within Germany, so they prepared a draft of a Reich "Gypsy Law" intended to supplement and accompany the Nuremberg Laws. The draft recommended identification and registration of all Roma, followed by sterilisation and deportation. In 1938, public health authorities were ordered to register all Roma and Roma Mischlinge. Despite Himmler's interest in enacting such legislation, which he said would prevent "further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existences of Gypsies in the living space of the German nation", the regime never promulgated the "Gypsy Law". In December 1942, Himmler ordered that all Roma were to be sent to Nazi concentration camps."Jewish problem"
Disenchanted with the unfulfilled promise of Nazi Party leaders to eliminate Jews from German society, SA members were eager to lash out against the Jewish minority as a way of expressing their frustrations. A Gestapo report from early 1935 stated that the rank and file of the Nazi Party would set in motion a solution to the "Jewish problem... from below that the government would then have to follow". Assaults, vandalism, and boycotts against Jews, which the Nazi government had temporarily curbed in 1934, increased again in 1935 amidst a propaganda campaign authorised at the highest levels of government. Most non-party members ignored the boycotts and objected to the violence out of concern for their own safety. Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka argues that there was a disparity between the views of the Alte Kämpfer and the general public, but that even those Germans who were not politically active favoured bringing in tougher new antisemitic laws in 1935. The matter was raised to the forefront of the state agenda as a result of this antisemitic agitation.Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick announced on 25 July that a law forbidding marriages between Jews and non-Jews would shortly be promulgated, and recommended that registrars should avoid issuing licences for such marriages for the time being. The draft law also called for a ban on marriage for persons with hereditary illnesses.
Hjalmar Schacht, Economics Minister and Reichsbank president, criticised the violent behaviour of the Alte Kämpfer and SA because of its negative impact on the economy. The violence also had a negative impact on Germany's reputation in the international community. For these reasons, Hitler ordered a stop to "individual actions" against German Jews on 8 August 1935, and Frick threatened to take legal action against Nazi Party members who ignored the order. From Hitler's perspective, it was imperative to quickly bring in new antisemitic laws to appease the radical elements in the party who persisted in attempting to remove the Jews from German society by violent means. A conference of ministers was held on 20 August 1935 to discuss the question. Hitler argued against violent methods because of the damage being done to the economy and insisted the matter must be settled through legislation. The focus of the new laws would be marriage laws to prevent "racial defilement", stripping Jews of their German citizenship, and laws to prevent Jews from participating freely in the economy.