Nazi Germany Enacts the Nuremberg Laws

Date

1935

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Europe (Germany)

Era

Modern

Significance

The Nuremberg Laws were the racial statutes that transformed Nazi antisemitism from street harassment into codified state persecution. Passed unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935 during the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, they comprised two measures.

The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship, reducing them to "state subjects" without political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and "Aryans" and forbade Jewish households from employing German women under 45. A supplementary decree that November defined Jewishness by ancestry—generally, three or more Jewish grandparents—drawing a pseudo-scientific line that trapped hundreds of thousands, including many who considered themselves fully German or Christian. Thirteen further decrees followed, systematically excluding Jews from professions, property, and public life. The laws provided the legal architecture for escalating dispossession and, ultimately, for the Holocaust, while offering a template that other regimes and collaborators would later imitate. They marked the pivotal moment when discrimination became law across an entire nation.

Empires active in 1935

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related social & demographic events

• Kristallnacht Unleashes Nationwide Anti-Jewish Violence
  1938
• The Holocaust and the 'Final Solution'
  1941–1945
• Bengal Famine of 1943
  1943–1944
• Influenza pandemic of 1918–1920
  1918–1920
• Emancipation of the serfs in Russia
  3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)
• The Great Irish Famine
  1845–1852

Also relevant

• The Holodomor (Soviet famine in Ukraine)
  1932–1933

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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