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The Nuremberg Laws (Nürnberger Gesetze, ) 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 Romani people and Afro-Germans, 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.
While he was imprisoned in 1924 after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf 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 ("people's community") with the aim of uniting all Germans as national comrades, whilst excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or of a foreign race ( Fremdvölkische).
Other laws which were promulgated during this period included the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (passed on 14 July 1933), which called for the compulsory sterilisation of people with a range of hereditary, physical, and mental illnesses. Under the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals (passed 24 November 1933), 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 (referred to as Zigeuner "Gypsies").
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.
Over the coming years, an additional 13 supplementary laws were promulgated that further marginalised the Jewish community in Germany. For example, Jewish families were not permitted to submit claims for subsidies for large families and were forbidden to transact business with Aryans.
Translations of the laws below are provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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| +Special cases with first-degree Mischlinge |
While Frick's suggestion that a citizenship tribunal before which every German would have to prove that they were Aryan was not acted upon, proving one's racial heritage became a necessary part of daily life. Non-government employers were authorised to include in their statutes an Aryan paragraph excluding both Mischlinge and Jews from employment. Proof of Aryan descent was achieved by obtaining an Aryan certificate. One form was to acquire an Ahnenpass, which could be obtained by providing birth or baptismal certificates that all four grandparents were of Aryan descent. The Ahnenpass could also be acquired by citizens of other countries, as long as they were of "German or related blood".
Under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour (15 September 1935), marriages were forbidden between Jews and Germans; between Mischlinge of the first degree and Germans; between Jews and Mischlinge of the second degree; and between two Mischlinge of the second degree. Mischlinge of the first degree were permitted to marry Jews, but they would henceforth be classed as Jewish themselves. All marriages undertaken between half-Jews and Germans required the approval of a Committee for the Protection of German Blood. Few such permissions were granted. A supplementary decree issued on 26 November 1935 extended the law to "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards".
Persons suspected of having sexual relations with non-Aryans were charged with Rassenschande (racial defilement) and tried in the regular courts. Evidence provided to the Gestapo for such cases was largely provided by ordinary citizens such as neighbours, co-workers, or other informants. Persons accused of race defilement were publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets with a placard around their necks detailing their crime. Those convicted were typically sentenced to prison terms, and (subsequent to 8 March 1938) upon completing their sentences were re-arrested by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps. As the law did not permit capital punishment for racial defilement, special courts were convened to allow the death penalty for some cases. From the end of 1935 through 1940, 1,911 people were convicted of Rassenschande. Over time, the law was extended to include non-sexual forms of physical contact such as greeting someone with a kiss or an embrace.
For the most part, Germans accepted the Nuremberg Laws, partly because Nazi propaganda had successfully swayed public opinion towards the general belief that Jews were a separate race, but also because to oppose the regime meant leaving oneself open to harassment or arrest by the Gestapo. Citizens were relieved that the antisemitic violence ceased after the laws were passed. Non-Jews gradually stopped socialising with Jews or shopping in Jewish-owned stores. Wholesalers who continued to serve Jewish merchants were marched through the streets with placards around their necks proclaiming them as traitors. The Communist Party and some elements of the Catholic Church were critical of the laws. Concerned that international opinion would be adversely swayed by the new laws, the Interior Ministry did not actively enforce them until after the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin that August.
The Interior Ministry estimated there were 750,000 Mischlinge as of April 1935 (studies done after the war put the number of Mischlinge at around 200,000). As Jews became more and more excluded from German society, they organised social events, schools, and activities of their own. Economic problems were not so easily solved, however; many Jewish firms went out of business due to lack of customers. This was part of the ongoing Aryanization process (the transfer of Jewish firms to non-Jewish owners, usually at prices far below market value) that the regime had initiated in 1933, which intensified after the Nuremberg Laws were passed. Former middle-class or wealthy business owners were forced to take employment in menial jobs to support their families, and many were unable to find work at all.
Although a stated goal of the Nazis was that all Jews should leave the country, emigration was problematic, as Jews were required to remit up to 90 per cent of their wealth as a tax upon leaving the country. Anyone caught transferring their money overseas was sentenced to lengthy terms in prison as "economic saboteurs". An exception was money sent to Palestine under the terms of the Haavara Agreement, whereby Jews could transfer some of their assets and emigrate to that country. Around 52,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine under the terms of this agreement between 1933 and 1939.
By the start of the Second World War in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, the British Mandate of Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries. By 1938 it was becoming almost impossible for potential Jewish emigrants to find a country that would take them. After the 1936–39 Arab revolt, the British were disinclined to accept any more Jews into Palestine for fear it would further destabilise the region. Nationalistic and Xenophobia people in other countries pressured their governments not to accept waves of Jewish immigrants, especially poverty-stricken ones. The Madagascar Plan, a proposed mass deportation of European Jews to Madagascar, proved to be impossible to carry out. Starting in mid-1941, the German government began resorting to mass exterminations of European Jews. The total number of Jews murdered during the resulting The Holocaust is estimated at 5.5 to 6 million people. Estimates of the death toll of Romani people in the Romani Holocaust range from 150,000 to 1,500,000.
An original typescript of the laws signed by Hitler was found by the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps in 1945. It ended up in the possession of General George S. Patton, who kept it in violation of orders that such finds should be turned over to the government. During a visit to Los Angeles in 1945, he handed it over to the Huntington Library, where it was stored in a bomb-proof vault. The library revealed the existence of the document in 1999 and sent it on permanent loan to the Skirball Cultural Center, which placed it on public display. The document was transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., in August 2010.
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