Nuremberg Laws

Impact

The impact of the Nuremberg Laws was far-reaching. It was the first concrete step that led to the Final Solution—that is, to the Holocaust against the Jews. In the months and years that followed, further legislation restricted the rights and activities of Jews. In 1936 Jews were banned from all professional jobs in Germany. Jews, then, could not become lawyers or doctors, nor could they attend universities. On March 31, 1938, a law was passed stipulating that government contracts could no longer be awarded to Jewish businesses. On September 30, 1938, a law was passed to prevent “Aryan” doctors from treating “non-Aryan” patients, and since Jews could not legally be doctors, Jews were effectively denied medical care unless they obtained it illegally and clandestinely. Throughout these years violence against Jews increased. It culminated on the night of November 9–10, 1938. That night thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized. Some two hundred synagogues were burned or ransacked, and thirty thousand Jews were deported to concentration camps. Because so many windows of Jewish businesses were broken, scattering glass on the sidewalks and streets, that night was called Kristallnacht, meaning “crystal night”—the Night of Broken Glass.

The logical conclusion of the denial of civil rights to Jews was the plan for their annihilation. This plan was formulated at the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. There it was announced to senior Nazi officials that Reinhard Heydrich was Hitler's appointee to deal with the “final solution to the Jewish question.” The plan called for the deportation of Jews to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. There they would work on road-building projects, during which many would die. The remainder would then be put to death in concentration camps. The exact plan was never implemented because the German military lost ground to the Soviet Union as the war progressed. As a result, Jews were either sent immediately to concentration camps or killed in their homes or communities.