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Two nurses in uniform pose outside the Berlin Jewish hospital. Circa 1930-1933.
(Photo courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
From 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1939 when the Second World War began, German Jews endured more than 400 decrees and regulations that placed numerous restrictions on their public and private lives. The legislation that was passed against the Jews of Germany was incremental yet harsh. The Jews were politically and socially disenfranchised within a matter of weeks after the Nazis consolidated power. Throughout the 1930s, they continued to be stripped of their economic rights as well.
Following the German state-sponsored boycott of all Jewish professionals and Jewish-owned businesses and the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in April 1933, the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed in September 1935. The Reich Citizenship Law and Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stripped Jews of their citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with Germans. The laws also sought to define who was Jewish – not by religious practice, but rather as someone “descended from at least three grandparents who [we]re racially full Jews.”
These laws formed the foundation of further decrees that aimed for the “aryanization” of various economic spheres, including retail, banks, industry and agriculture, and the removal of Jews from various professions. Simultaneous to these laws, from April 1933 to April 1938, the plunder of Jewish property and assets in Germany proceeded apace: while it took only a few months to deprive Jews of their professions and civil rights, it took five years to implement the “aryanization” of Jewish wealth. Different professional groups were likewise targeted for “de-Jewification.” For example, on January 17, 1939, Hitler issued the Eighth Executive Order on the Reich Citizenship Law, which prohibited Jews from working as nurses, veterinarians, dentists, and homeopaths. Other executive orders on the Reich Citizenship Law removed voting privileges, defined “Jewish firms,” and disbarred Jewish attorneys.
With the prospect of another European war looming, antisemitic legislation in the Reich paved the way for increasingly radical persecution of the Jews. The spiral of deprivation had begun: initially, the Jews were deprived of their rights, their jobs, their relationships, their assets; this gave way to deprivation of physical freedom, and eventually, life itself. To put it in another way, the late Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg identified the stages of destruction as definition and labeling, dispossession, deportation, ghettoization, and finally, murder.
In analyzing the legislative onslaught against the Jews in Nazi Germany with your students, it is important to reinforce that while these laws, orders, and decrees were issued incrementally, and gradually removed Jews from society and stigmatized them, there was nothing inevitable about the Holocaust. An examination of the regulations that lay the foundation for later persecution, including the deportation of Jews to death camps in the East, should be done within the context of understanding that no one, not even the Nazis, knew at the time that this progression would lead to the decision to murder all the Jews of Europe. Using survivor testimony, such as these found at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum site, students can explore the impact of anti-Jewish legislation on its victims and how German Jews coped with the restrictions.
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