The Nuremberg Laws: How Germany Legalized Persecution

On the evening of 15 September 1935, at the close of the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, the German Reichstag was summoned to a special session in the city and passed two laws by acclamation. Neither had existed in draft form a week earlier. Together they took less than an hour to adopt. Yet the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor — known collectively as the Nuremberg Laws — became the legal foundation on which the entire machinery of persecution was built. They turned antisemitism from a matter of party slogans and street violence into the settled law of the German state.

To understand the Holocaust, it is necessary to understand this moment. Mass murder did not begin in 1935. But the murder of six million people required first that they be separated, defined, and stripped of the protections that citizenship confers. The Nuremberg Laws did that work, and they did it with the full authority of a modern legal system.

The Road to Nuremberg

The Nazi Party had come to power in January 1933, and within weeks the assault on German Jews had begun. A nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933 was followed by the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which dismissed Jews from government employment. Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers, and students were progressively excluded from public life. Yet through 1934 and into 1935, this persecution remained legally improvised — a patchwork of decrees, local bans, and unofficial intimidation.

By the summer of 1935, radical elements in the party, particularly the SA and Julius Streicher's followers in Franconia, were agitating for a comprehensive settlement of what they called the “Jewish question.” Violent boycotts and anti-Jewish riots broke out in Berlin and other cities. Some officials argued that a legal framework would restore order. Hitler, who had refrained from sweeping legislation partly out of concern for foreign opinion, decided that the September rally would be the occasion.

The decision was abrupt. On 13 September, Interior Ministry officials were ordered to Nuremberg to draft a law against marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Working through the night, they produced several versions; Hitler chose among them on 15 September. Hermann Göring, as Reichstag president, announced them to thunderous applause.

The Two Laws

The Reich Citizenship Law created a distinction that had never before existed in German law. It divided the population into Reichsbürger — citizens of the Reich, defined as those of “German or kindred blood” — and mere Staatsangehörige, or state subjects. Only Reich citizens held full political rights. Jews, by definition, could not be Reich citizens. They became, in their own country, a category of resident with obligations but no political standing. The law was brief, just three articles, but its consequences would be spelled out in thirteen supplementary decrees over the following years, each removing another right.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor went further into private life. It prohibited marriage between Jews and citizens of “German or kindred blood,” and declared any such marriage void even if contracted abroad. It criminalized sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews outside marriage, an offense the law termed Rassenschande — “racial defilement” — punishable by imprisonment. It forbade Jews from employing German women under the age of 45 as household servants. And it prohibited Jews from flying the German flag.

The language of the laws was deliberately clinical. There was no mention of hatred. The laws presented themselves as measures of hygiene and order, and it was precisely this bureaucratic tone that gave them their force. Judges applied them. Registrars enforced them. Police investigated them. Ordinary Germans denounced their neighbors under them.

Defining Who Was a Jew

The laws passed in Nuremberg contained a gap: they did not say who counted as a Jew. That question was settled on 14 November 1935 by the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, after weeks of argument between party radicals and ministry officials. The definition that emerged was not religious but genealogical. A person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew, regardless of whether they had ever set foot in a synagogue. A person with two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling of the first degree, unless they belonged to the Jewish religious community or were married to a Jew, in which case they counted as a Jew. A person with one Jewish grandparent was a Mischling of the second degree.

The absurdity was evident even to those who drafted it: because “Jewish blood” could not be measured, the decree ultimately defined a Jewish grandparent as one who had belonged to the Jewish religious community. A racial law thus rested on a religious foundation. But the consequences were not absurd. Baptized Christians whose grandparents had been Jewish suddenly discovered that they were no longer Germans. Families that had served in the Kaiser's army, that had lived in Germany for centuries, were reclassified overnight. Charts printed by the party showed citizens how to calculate ancestry.

Life Under the Laws

For Germany's roughly 500,000 Jews, the Nuremberg Laws ended any remaining hope that the persecution was temporary. Now it was written into the law of the state. Jewish veterans who had fought at Verdun found that their sacrifice counted for nothing. Mixed couples faced the choice of separation or prosecution. In the years that followed, hundreds of people were tried and imprisoned for Rassenschande, their names and photographs published as a warning to others.

Emigration accelerated. Between 1933 and 1939, roughly half of German Jews left the country, though the doors of the world were narrowing at the same time as the pressure to leave was rising. Those who stayed — often the elderly, the poor, and those who could not bear to abandon their homes — found the supplementary decrees tightening around them: barred from voting, from holding public office, from practicing medicine and law, and finally, in 1938, from the economy altogether.

The laws also established a precedent that spread. Italy adopted racial laws modeled on Nuremberg in 1938. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Vichy France introduced their own versions. Wherever German power extended after 1939, the definitions worked out in November 1935 determined who would be registered, marked, ghettoized, and deported.

From Definition to Destruction

When SS officials met at Wannsee in January 1942 to coordinate the “Final Solution,” much of their discussion concerned the treatment of Mischlinge and mixed marriages — the categories created at Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Laws did not decree genocide, and no one voting for them in that Nuremberg hall could have foreseen the gas chambers. But the laws answered the question that genocide requires: who belongs, and who does not. Once a state has decided that a group of people are not its citizens, that their marriages are crimes and their presence a defilement, the distance to deciding that their lives have no value is shorter than it appears.

The signed originals of the laws were found by American troops in 1945 and were kept for decades by General George Patton's family before being transferred to the National Archives in Washington. They are unremarkable documents: a few typed pages, some signatures. The Holocaust was made possible not only by fanatics but by paperwork — by laws drafted overnight, passed by acclamation, and enforced by people who told themselves they were only following the rules.