The Nuremberg Laws

What happened

On September 15, 1935, at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler announced two laws, and a Reichstag session held there passed them. ² The first was the Reich Citizenship Law. The second was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. ¹ Together they are what people mean by the Nuremberg Laws. ¹

The citizenship law is three short articles. Article 1 defines a "subject of the State" as someone belonging to the protective union of the German Reich. Article 2 says a citizen of the Reich "is only that subject who is of German or kindred blood" and who shows willingness to serve the German people, and that only Reich citizens hold full political rights. Article 3 hands the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Deputy Führer the power to issue implementing decrees. It was signed by Hitler and by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. ³ Jews became subjects of the state rather than citizens. ²

The blood law banned marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, conduct the regime called Rassenschande, race defilement. ² Thousands of people were convicted under it or disappeared into concentration camps on the accusation. ²

Neither law said what a Jew was. That came two months later, in the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, signed by Hitler, Frick and Rudolf Hess. ³ Article 5 defines a Jew as a person "descended from at least three grandparents who were fully Jewish by race," and also as a person descended from two such grandparents who met further conditions involving membership in a Jewish religious community, marriage, or the status of offspring. ³ Article 2 defines a person of mixed Jewish blood, a Mischling, as one "descended from one or two grandparents who were fully Jewish by race." ³ Article 4 is the operative sentence: "A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He has no right to vote in political affairs; he cannot occupy a public office." ³

A grandparent counted as "fully Jewish by race" if that grandparent had belonged to a Jewish religious community, established through baptism records, community registration rolls and gravestones. ¹ A regime that located Jewishness in the blood measured it with synagogue paperwork, which is why the definition caught baptized Christians and people with no religious connection to Judaism at all. ² The same racial framework was later applied to Roma, Sinti and Black people in Germany and their descendants. ²

The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933 had already introduced the Aryan paragraph barring Jews from government posts, with parallel exclusions from the legal profession that same day, from university enrollment on April 25, and from editorial work on October 4. ⁴ More than 400 legal restrictions were imposed at various levels of government during Hitler's first six years. ⁴ The 1935 laws established the legal framework the rest of that legislation was built on, and were a decisive step in isolating Jews from German society. ¹

Why it still matters

The grandparent rule is what made the later decrees administrable. The order of August 17, 1938 requiring Jewish men to add the name "Israel" and women "Sara," the invalidation and reissue of passports with a stamped "J" on October 5, 1938, and the expulsion of Jewish children from public schools on November 15, 1938 all depended on a register of who fell inside the November 1935 definition. ⁴

The categories outlived the paperwork stage. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, fifteen senior officials including Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann met to coordinate the Final Solution, with Heydrich putting roughly 11 million European Jews inside its scope. ⁵ Among the items discussed was deferring measures until after the war against Jews married to non-Jews and against "persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws." ⁵ Articles 2 and 5 were still sorting who was deported and who was postponed six years after they were signed. ⁵ Our explainer on the Holocaust in numbers covers the toll itself.

The thresholds are widely misremembered. One or two fully Jewish grandparents made a person a Mischling under Article 2, and three or four made a person a Jew under Article 5, so a single Jewish grandparent did not make anyone a Jew in German law. ³

The misremembering does real work in a live Israeli argument. Section 4A of the Law of Return, added in 1970, extends immigration rights to the child and grandchild of a Jew. ⁶ One camp holds that the clause exists so that anyone the Nazis would have hunted can find a home in a Jewish state. Amnon Rubinstein put the case directly: if such a definition was enough to have a person killed, it should now serve to provide a home. ⁶ The other camp says the history is thinner than advertised. The Israel Democracy Institute describes the 1970 clause as a political compromise crafted to reduce tensions after the Shalit affair, and notes that many legislators at the time objected to the Nazi analogy on assimilation grounds. ⁶ Eugene Kontorovich of the Kohelet Policy Forum grants that the provision "is also frequently justified as allowing anyone who was persecuted by the Nazis to find refuge in Israel," then argues it "has also outlived its purpose a century after Nuremberg," and that to keep the definition now "would be to allow Hitler to dictate Israel's aliyah policy forever." ⁷

The numbers underneath the argument are real. In 1990, 93.1% of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union were registered as Jewish. By 2020 that share was 28.3%. ⁶ Our separate explainers on the Law of Return and on who counts as a Jew take that fight on its own terms.

Our view: the reach-of-persecution principle is worth keeping, and it should be argued on its merits rather than on a claim about 1935 legislative intent that the record does not support. Section 4A can be defended without borrowing authority from Wilhelm Frick's arithmetic.

The words you'll hear

The Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, both announced by Hitler at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935. ¹

Reich Citizenship Law. The statute limiting Reich citizenship and full political rights to subjects "of German or kindred blood," which turned Jews into state subjects without political rights. ³

Rassenschande. Race defilement, the regime's term for marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, banned by the blood law and prosecuted against thousands. ²

Mischling. Under Article 2 of the November 14, 1935 First Regulation, a person descended from one or two grandparents who were "fully Jewish by race." Neither German nor Jewish in the regime's scheme, with rights narrowed by later legislation. ³

The First Regulation. The November 14, 1935 supplementary decree that supplied the grandparent arithmetic, barred Jews from Reich citizenship, the vote and public office, and became the definition the later decrees ran on. ³

Aryan paragraph. The clause introduced in the April 7, 1933 civil service law that excluded Jews from government employment, two and a half years before Nuremberg. ⁴