Adolf Hitler at the 1935 Nuremberg rally
A chart describing the Nuremberg laws
A destroyed Jewish shop after Kristallnacht
September 15th 1935: Nuremberg laws imposed
On this day in 1935, the antisemitic Nuremberg race laws were introduced by the Nazi government in Germany. Adolf Hitler, upon becoming German Chancellor and President in 1933, set about to destroy Jewish influence in German society. Jews only comprised under one percent of the German population, but Hitler perceived them as a threat to the dominance and homogeneity of the white ‘master-race’. Discriminatory policy began as measures to boycott Jewish business, and exclude Jews from prominent jobs in politics, journalism, medicine, law, and the military. Jewish citizens were also subject to everyday harassment, violence, and exclusion from shops and public areas. The September 1935 laws, proclaimed at the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, established this racist ideology as the law of the land, stripping German Jews of their citizenship (reclassifying them as subjects of the state), and imposing restrictions on Jews marrying or having sexual relations with ‘Aryans’. The laws targeted Jews as a race, rather than a religious group, as it defined a Jew not as someone who practiced the religion, but anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents. In November, the Nuremberg laws were extended to blacks and Roma gyspies, who were also considered a threat to Hitler’s vision of white supremacy. The treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany became steadily harsher, with exclusionary laws forcing them to wear yellow stars of David, in addition to mass violence such as Kristallnacht in 1938, and imprisonment in concentration camps. In the twelve years of Hitler’s Reich, over four-hundred regulations were issued against the Jewish population, resulting in the complete social and economic subjugation of German Jews. In the early 1940s, Hitler resolved to eradicate Jewish influence entirely, initiating a genocidal programme of extermination which ultimately claimed the lives of six million Jews.
80 years ago today
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