#ThisDayInHistory The First NuremBerg Laws Were Passed

On this day in 1935, the Nürnberg Laws, among the first pieces of racist Nazi legislation that would culminate in the Holocaust, was passed in Germany. 

Designed by Adolf Hitler, they deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood.”

The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens.

The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date.

The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romanis as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.

Adolf Hitler declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933, and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service passed on 7 April, excluding the so-called non-Aryans from the legal profession, the civil service, and teaching in secondary schools and universities. Books considered un-German, including those by Jewish authors, were destroyed in a nationwide book burning on 10 May.

Jewish citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks. They were actively suppressed, stripped of their citizenship and civil rights, and eventually completely removed from German society.

Out of foreign policy concerns, prosecutions under the two laws did not commence until after the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin.

The Nuremberg Laws had a crippling economic and social impact on the Jewish community.

Non-Jews gradually stopped socializing with Jews or shopping in Jewish-owned stores, many of which closed due to a lack of customers. As Jews were no longer permitted to work in the civil service or government-regulated professions such as medicine and education, many middle-class business owners and professionals were forced to take menial employment.

Emigration was problematic, as Jews were required to remit up to 90% of their wealth as a tax upon leaving the country.

By 1938 it was almost impossible for potential Jewish emigrants to find a country willing to take them. Mass deportation schemes such as the Madagascar Plan proved to be impossible for the Nazis to carry out, and starting in mid-1941, the German government started mass exterminations of the Jews of Europe.

The total number of Jews murdered during the resulting Holocaust is estimated at 5.5 to 6 million people. Estimates of the death toll of Romanis in the Porajmos range from 150,000 to 1,500,000.

#ThisDayInHistory

September 15, 1935