nuremberg-laws
The two racial laws enacted at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg on 15 September 1935 that stripped Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. They provided the legal foundation for the systematic exclusion of Jews from German society.
The Nuremberg Laws — the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, and the Reich Citizenship Law — were drafted hastily by civil servants working through the night before the rally and presented as the regime’s formal response to the question of Germany’s Jewish population. The Law for the Protection of German Blood prohibited marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and ‘persons of German or related blood’ (Aryans), as well as the employment of German women under 45 in Jewish households. The Reich Citizenship Law created a new category of ‘Reich citizens’ — restricted to those of ‘German or related blood’ — while Jews became mere ‘subjects’ (Staatsangehörige) without political rights. Subsequent regulations defined who was a Jew: anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents, or with two Jewish grandparents if they were married to a Jew or practised Judaism. The laws created profound uncertainty for the estimated 500,000 people of partially Jewish ancestry — the Mischlinge — whose legal status was contested throughout the Nazi period. The Nuremberg Laws transformed the administrative exclusion of Jews that had begun in 1933 into a systematic racial legal framework, providing the bureaucratic foundation for the subsequent escalating persecution.
The Nuremberg Laws illustrate the role of law in making atrocity routine. By converting racial exclusion from an ideological commitment into a legal framework with administrative categories, definitions, and enforcement mechanisms, they made the persecution of Jews a matter of ordinary bureaucratic procedure rather than exceptional political violence. Civil servants processed the paperwork; courts applied the definitions; registrars recorded the racial status. This bureaucratisation of discrimination did not reduce its violence — it facilitated it — but it distributed the moral responsibility across thousands of administrators who could believe they were simply following the law. The laws also demonstrate the danger of treating legal form as a guarantee of legitimacy: a state that can pass any law it wishes, subject to no constitutional constraint and no judicial independence, can use the form of law to accomplish anything.
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