On Sept. 15, 1935, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party introduced the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honor in Nuremberg, Germany. Subsequently known as the Nuremberg Laws, this legislation stripped German Jews of their citizenship and proved a significant event on the road to the Holocaust.
When Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, his first targets were communists, social democrats and trade unionists. The first concentration camp at Dachau hosted many such political prisoners. Few Jews were arrested simply for being Jewish at this point, however. Instead, the regime ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses that April.
Hitler began implementing plans to purge Jews from the German civil service and business community. Rather than a state-directed campaign of terror and violence against the Jews, however, many local Nazi thugs and anti-Semites began their own pogroms. Many Germans, even ardent followers of Hitler and moderate anti-Semites, disliked the beatings or public humiliations of the Jews, seeing it as flying in the face of law and order.
Still, the first two years of the regime saw such local acts of violence carried out by Nazi stormtroopers and party thugs largely on their own initiative, while the Nazi authorities and local police forces turned a blind eye. By 1935, some Germans were calling for legislation to end such violence — not out of a desire to protect the Jews so much as to restore a sense of legality and stability to usually orderly German life.
This meshed with Hitler's desire to create a comprehensive legislation that would define Jewish restrictions and “rights,” as well as combat what was seen as a major problem in Nazi eyes: racial mixing. Hitler was influenced by the late 19th- and early 20th-century school of thought that some races, like the British and the German, were great civilization builders, while others created flawed imitations of or were destroyers of civilization.
It was a crime against the German race, in Hitler's eyes, for Germans and Jews to intermarry or engage in sexual relations.
During the September 1935 party rally at Nuremberg, an annual Nazi tradition, Hitler decided to act. First of all, he wanted the swastika, long the symbol of Nazism and flying upon flags throughout Germany, to replace the black, red and yellow of the Weimar-era flag. Not long before the rally began, dock workers in New York City had desecrated a swastika flag from a German ship and had been acquitted of the crime. On the last day of the rally, an outraged Hitler called the Reichstag, the German parliament, to order in Nuremberg.
In the book “The Third Reich in Power,” historian Richard J. Evans wrote: “The Reichstag session, (Hitler) now decided, would be the opportune moment to introduce the citizenship, miscegenation and state flag laws all in one go. After some hurried, last-minute drafting of the detailed Laws in collaboration with an Interior Ministry official, Hitler introduced them on 15 September 1935.”
Evans noted that Hermann Goering, Hitler's No. 2 man, gave a speech justifying the new laws. He stated that the swastika was a “symbol of our struggle for our own, species-specific race, it was a sign to us of the struggle against the Jews as racial wreckers.”
By this point, the Reichstag was little more than a rubber stamp for Hitler's decrees, and the body passed the laws unanimously. In addition to depriving German Jews of their citizenship, the laws forbade future marriages between Germans and Jews, though existing unions would still be tolerated (though the German partners would be put under increasing pressure to divorce, and the laws for such divorces were made much easier).
Any kind of sexual relations between Germans and Jews were outlawed. Jews were also forbidden to fly the German flag from their homes, though the law stated that they were permitted “to display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is protected by the state.”
There was one possible problem in implementing the new laws, Hitler recognized. Exactly who was a Jew? Jews with two Jewish parents obviously fit the criteria, but what about children of mixed parentage?
Evans wrote, “To such questions there was no rational answer, because there was from the beginning no rational basis to the assumptions on which they rested. All solutions the Nazis arrived at ... were thus in the end entirely arbitrary.”
By November 1935, legislation had been created to further clarify the question. Not wishing to cast apparently loyal Germans into the ranks of their enemies, the Nazis created a complicated system of degrees, based upon those arbitrary factors like whether the person in question was married to a Jew, or if they practiced the Jewish religion. Hitler was also granted the right to decide in individual cases.
In the book “Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe,” historian Robert Gellately wrote: “The response to the laws ran the gamut. They were welcomed by some people who hoped for an end to violence. Others began to feel sorry for Jews, but some felt the laws did not go far enough. … The new laws created a kind of invisible ghetto and opened the door to the denouncers to lay ever more charges, often for personal gain. The participation of ordinary citizens made the enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws possible.”
The Nuremberg Laws marginalized Germany's Jews while psychologically preparing the German people for the coming atrocities of the Holocaust, even if they hadn't yet been fully developed by the Nazi authorities.
Today, as anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head throughout the world, it is more important than ever to remember just how these early stages of the Holocaust played out to avert similar tragedies in the future.
Cody K. Carlson holds a master's in history from the University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College. An avid player of board games, he blogs at thediscriminatinggamer.com. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com