Nuremberg Laws

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Three documents are reproduced. The first is the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. The second is the Reich Citizenship Law. Both were promulgated on September 15, 1935, at the Seventh Party Congress, the Nazi Party rally held in Nuremberg, Germany. Taken together, they institutionalized the Nazi Party's racist ideology. The third document, enacted on November 14, 1935, was the First Supplementary Decree to the Nuremberg Laws. Its purpose was to clarify the earlier Nuremberg Laws and to make clear that a Jew could not be regarded as a citizen of Germany's Third Reich.

Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

The introduction to this law asserts the superiority of “German blood” and the need for Germans to preserve the purity of their racial heritage to ensure the continued existence of the German state. This emphasis on blood was an obsession of Nazi ideologues, who used theories of eugenics and racial categorization to rally the German people behind the nation's effort to rebuild and reassert its strength after World War I and the turmoil that followed the war.

Section 1 makes clear that the target of the law is Jews. The first part of this section outlawed marriages between people of German blood and Jews, even if those marriages were entered into in other nations. The second part of the section takes up the issue of the annulment of such marriages, stating that such annulments fell under the authority of the state prosecutor. Section 2 made it illegal for Germans to have sexual relations with Jews outside of marriage. Clearly, if such marriages were illegal, then having sexual relations with a Jew under any circumstances was also illegal.

As a result of section 3, Jews were prohibited from hiring as a domestic servant any German woman under the age of forty-five. It was commonplace for affluent Jewish families to employ German women as servants, cooks, and housekeepers. To Nazi ideologists, such employment was regarded as undignified and as beneath German citizens. The law did, however, acknowledge that some older women, perhaps having been in domestic service for their entire adult lives, had no other employment opportunities because of their age. Thus the law allowed older women to continue to work in Jewish homes.

According to section 4, Jews were no longer permitted to fly the German flag or to display the colors of the Reich. This action seems counterintuitive, for one might expect that German authorities would want anyone living within the nation's borders to engage in patriotic displays. Jews, however, were regarded as lesser humans—among many Nazis, they were viewed as not even human but as vermin who had to be exterminated—so it was logical to them to exclude Jews from patriotic displays. Nevertheless, Jews were allowed to display Jewish colors—that is, a yellow Star of David. Colors played an important role in Nazi Germany. In the concentration camps, for instance, the categories to which prisoners belonged were identifiable by the colors of their badges. Red was reserved for Communists, anarchists, and enemies of the state; green was used for criminals, brown for Gypsies, pink for homosexuals, and so on. That the article grants Jews the “right” to wear Jewish colors was perverse, for this “right” soon became an obligation.

Sections 5–7 address legal procedures. Section 5 specifies the punishment that a German citizen would face for violating any of the earlier articles of the law. Section 6 notes that procedures for implementing the law would be promulgated by the Reich minister of the interior (Wilhelm Frick), in coordination with the deputy of the Führer (Rudolph Hess) and the Reich minister of justice (Franz Gürtner). (Führer, the German word for “leader,” was the title generally given to Hitler.) Section 7 indicates when the laws would take effect.

Reich Citizenship Law

The Reich Citizenship Law, announced on the same day in connection with the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, circularly defines a German citizen as anyone who is granted citizenship under the law. Article 1 of the law notes that a citizen enjoys the protection of the state, but it also points out that a citizen has obligations to the state. Article 2 reiterates the importance of blood; a person could be a citizen of the state only if he or she was of German blood. Additionally, to be a citizen, a person had to be “both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally the German people and the Reich.” The Nazi regime had no patience with anyone who, in its view, was unable to serve the interests of the state. Although Jews figured most prominently in the horrors of the concentration camps, also shipped off to the camps were Communists, anarchists, labor unionists, homosexuals, foreign workers, alcoholics, vagrants, and anyone who had no fixed address—in short, anyone whom the Nazi regime regarded as unable or unwilling to make a contribution to Nazism and to Germany. Article 3 of the law again states that the Reich minister of the interior, in coordination with the deputy of the Führer, would issue procedures for implementing the citizenship law.

First Supplementary Decree

In the months that followed the Nuremberg rally, the Nazi regime issued several supplementary decrees for the purpose of implementing the two Nuremberg Laws. The first of these decrees specifically defines who was a Jew. In general, the Nazis were not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion; rather, Judaism was a matter of ethnicity, of blood, so it did not matter to the Nazis whether a person was a practicing Jew. In the years that followed the Nuremberg Laws, many Europeans who were ethnic Jews but who had not practiced Judaism became victims of Nazism. Some of these ethnic Jews had even converted to Christianity, possibly in order to marry Christians, but religious practices did not influence the Nazis. Judaism was a matter of blood, and Jewish blood was regarded as a corruption, as part of the degeneration and defilement of pure German blood. Thus a person's beliefs did not matter. All that mattered was the person's race.

The practical problem, though, was clearly defining who was a Jew. Anyone whose parents were both Jews was a Jew. The question arose, however, as to what to do with so-called Mischlings, or people of mixed blood. What if just one of a person's parents was a Jew? What if a person's grandparents on one side, say the father's, were Jews, but the grandparents on the other side were not? Or what if just one of a person's four grandparents was a Jew? The First Supplementary Decree was designed to answer these questions. It begins with article 1, which states that “all subjects of German or kindred blood who possessed the right to vote in the Reichstag elections when the Citizenship Law came into effect, shall, for the present, possess the rights of Reich citizens.” Again, the law is circular, essentially defining citizenship by saying that a German citizen is one who has been granted citizenship.

Article 2 of the decree states that an “individual of mixed Jewish blood is one who is descended from one or two grandparents who, racially, were full Jews.” Article 3 then states that only those who have voting rights and the right to hold public office can be considered citizens of the Reich, again a kind of circular statement that says, in effect, that a person is a citizen if that person has the rights of citizenship. The decree then takes up a different topic by stating in article 4 that “a Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich” and therefore cannot vote or hold public office—this despite the fact that Jews had lived in Germany for hundreds of years and had established schools, synagogues, businesses, cemeteries, and other institutions. Any Jew who served in an official capacity would be retired as of the end of the year. Jews who had served in World War I were receiving pensions, and this section outlines how future pensions would be computed. The remainder of article 4 exempts religious organizations from the law, though the meaning of this statement is unclear, for the law does not state any sense in which religious organizations could be affected by the law. The article then mentions that issues involving teachers in Jewish schools would be taken up in future legislation. In the event, many Jewish children were expelled from state schools, and Jewish teachers were fired. The result was the establishment of numerous schools where Jewish children were taught by Jewish teachers.

Article 5 is the core of the Nuremberg Laws insofar as they applied to Jews. In this section the law specifies who precisely was a Jew. A person was automatically considered a Jew if three of his or her grandparents were Jews. Moreover, a person was considered a Jew if two of his or her grandparents were Jews, but only under certain conditions. The first of these conditions was that the person in question was a member of the Jewish religious community. The second was that the person in question was married to a Jew. The third was that the person in question was the son or daughter of a Jew as defined earlier, if the marriage that produced the child took place after the Nuremberg Laws were passed. Finally, a person was automatically a Jew if he or she was born of an extramarital relationship with a Jew, provided that the person was born after July 31, 1936. Many Germans found the provisions of these laws confusing. In particular, many Jews were uncertain as to whether the regime would regard them as Jews. As a result, in promulgating the laws, German officials devised a chart, rather like a genealogical chart, that showed visually who exactly was a Jew and who was not. Further, the decree embodies a colossal irony. Jews, too, regarded Jewishness as a matter of blood, in a sense. For complicated religious reasons, Jewishness was matrilineal, meaning that it was established through the mother's line. Thus, to Jews, a person was a Jew if his or her mother was a Jew. It was characteristic of the Nazis, though, to complicate the matter to gather within the Jewish net anyone who, in the regime's estimation, was “tainted” by Judaism.

Article 6 makes clear that if any other laws existed to define German blood that went beyond article 5 of the First Supplementary Decree, those laws would remain untouched—perhaps a tacit recognition that the Nazi regime was writing and passing these laws without much thought or consistency. Article 7 gave Hitler the authority to exempt any individual from the laws and decrees, allowing him to contradict his own ideology for his own ends for expediency's sake.