Nuremberg Laws
The Reichstag met at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg on 15 September 1935 and passed two laws by acclamation in about an hour. They had been drafted in a matter of days. Hitler had decided at short notice that the rally needed a legislative act, officials were flown in, and the text was written on the back of a menu card at one point for want of paper. The Reich Citizenship Law divided the population into citizens, who were of German or related blood, and mere subjects of the state, who had no political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans, and forbade Jewish households from employing German women under forty-five. Neither law defined who was a Jew, and the supplementary decree that did so in November was argued over for weeks — the criterion adopted was grandparents' religion, since race could not be tested, which is the contradiction at the centre of the whole system. Someone with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew; two made a Mischling of the first degree, with the classification depending on marriage and observance. The laws were the culmination of two years of piecemeal exclusion from the civil service, the professions, the universities and the arts, and they gave it a legal architecture. Registration produced the lists later used for deportation. The Reichstag never met again to pass anything of consequence, and the laws stood until 1945. Britain and the United States both restricted Jewish immigration through the same years, and the Evian conference of 1938 produced nothing.
- Year: 1935 CE
- Category: Political
