Editing Racial policy of Nazi Germany (section)

==Racial policies regarding the Jews, 1933–1939==
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 133-075, Worms, Antisemitische Presse, "Stürmerkasten".jpg|thumb|left|Public reading of [[Julius Streicher]]'s anti-Semitic newspaper ''[[Der Stürmer]]'', [[Worms, Germany]], 1935]]

Approximately 525,000 [[History of the Jews in Germany|Jews]] were living in Germany in 1933 (0.75% of the entire German population).<ref>{{cite web|url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country|title=Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country|website=encyclopedia.ushmm.org}}</ref> Discrimination against Jews began immediately after the national seizure of power in 1933.{{sfn|Shirer|1960|p=203}} The Nazi Party used [[Populism|populist]] antisemitic views to gain votes. Using the "[[Stab-in-the-back myth|stab-in-the-back legend]]", they blamed poverty, the [[hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic]], unemployment, and the loss of World War I and surrender by the "[[Stab-in-the-back myth|November Criminals]]" all on the Jews and "cultural Bolsheviks", the latter considered to be in a [[Judeo-Bolshevism|conspiracy with the Jews]]. German woes were attributed to the effects of the [[Treaty of Versailles]]. In 1933, persecution of the Jews became active Nazi policy. This was at first hindered by the lack of agreement on who qualified as a [[Jew]] as opposed to an [[Aryan race|Aryan]]; this caused legislators to balk at an antisemitic law for its ill-defined terms.{{sfn|Koonz|2003|p=170}} [[Bernhard Lösener]] described it as "total chaos", with local authorities regarding anything from full Jewish background to {{frac|1|8}} Jewish blood as defining a Jew; [[Achim Gercke]] urged {{frac|1|16}} Jewish blood.{{sfn|Koonz|2003|p=171}} Those of mixed descent (''[[Mischling]]e'') were especially problematic in their eyes.{{sfn|Koonz|2003|p=174}} The first antisemitic law was promulgated with no clear definition of a Jew.{{sfn|Koonz|2003|p=184}} Finally, the criterion was set at three or four Jewish grandparents; two or one rendered a person a ''Mischling''.{{sfn|Koonz|2003|p=187}}

On April 1, 1933, the [[Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses]] was observed throughout Germany. Only six days later, the [[Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service]] was passed, banning Jews from [[Public sector|government jobs]]. It is notable that the proponents of this law, and the several thousand more that were to follow, most frequently explained them as necessary to prevent the infiltration of damaging, "alien-type" (''Artfremd'') hereditary traits into the German national or racial community (''[[Volksgemeinschaft]]'').{{sfn|Ehrenreich|2007|pp=1, 165–167}} These laws meant that Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from privileged and superior positions reserved for "Aryan Germans". From then on, Jews were forced to work in more menial positions, becoming [[second-class citizen]]s or to the point that they were "illegally residing" in [[Nazi Germany]].

In the early years of Nazi rule, there were efforts to secure the elimination of Jews by expulsion; later, a more explicit commitment was made to extermination. On August 25, 1933, the Nazis signed the [[Haavara Agreement]] with [[Zionism|Zionists]] to allow [[German Jews]] to emigrate to [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]] in exchange for a portion of their economic assets. The agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Nazi Germany; by 1939, 60,000 German Jews (about 10% of the Jewish population) had emigrated there. Thereafter, Nazi policy eventually changed to one of total extermination. Nazi doctrine culminated in [[the Holocaust]], or so-called "[[Final Solution]]", which was made official at the January 1942 [[Wannsee Conference]].

===Nuremberg Laws===
{{Main|Nuremberg Laws}}

{{More citations needed section|date=April 2021}}

[[Image:Nuremberg laws Racial Chart.jpg|thumb|upright=1.65|1935 Chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the [[Nuremberg Laws]]. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 employed a [[scientific racism|pseudo-scientific basis]] for racial discrimination against Jews. People with four German grandparents (white circles) were of "German blood", while people were classified as Jews if they were descended from three or more Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). Either one or two Jewish grandparents made someone a ''Mischling'' (of mixed blood). The Nazis used the religious observance of a person's grandparents to determine their race.]]

Between 1935 and 1936, persecution of the Jews increased apace while the process of "''[[Gleichschaltung]]''" ({{lit|standardisation}}, the process by which the Nazis achieved complete control over German society) was implemented. In May 1935, Jews were forbidden to join the ''[[Wehrmacht]]'' (the armed forces), and in the summer of the same year, anti-Semitic propaganda appeared in shops and restaurants. The Nuremberg Laws were passed around the time of the great Nazi rallies at [[Nuremberg]]; on September 15, 1935, the "[[Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor]]" was passed. At first this criminalized sexual relations and marriage only between Germans and Jews, as well as the employment of German women by Jews.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Whitman |first=James |title=Hitler's American Model : the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law |date=2017 |publisher=Princeton}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Brown |first=Kellie D. |title=The sound of hope: Music as solace, resistance and salvation during the holocaust |publisher=McFarland |year=2020 |isbn=978-1-4766-7056-0 |page=13}}</ref> The law was later extended to "Gypsies, Negroes and their bastard offspring"; it became punishable by law as ''[[Rassenschande]]'' or racial pollution.<ref>{{cite book | author = S. H. Milton | chapter = "Gypsies" as social outsiders in Nazi Germany| title =  Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany | editor = Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus | year = 2001 | publisher = Princeton University Press | isbn = 9780691086842 | pages = 216, 231}}</ref>{{sfn|Burleigh|Wippermann|1991|p=49}} After this, the "[[Nuremberg Laws|Reich Citizenship Law]]" was passed, and was reinforced in November by a decree; it included only people of "German or related blood", which meant that all Jews were stripped of their [[citizenship]] and their official title became "subjects of the state". This meant that they were deprived of basic citizens' rights, e.g. the right to vote.<ref name="wistrich2002">{{cite book | last = Wistrich | first = Robert | title = Who's Who in Nazi Germany | publisher = [[Routledge]] | year = 2002 | isbn = 0-415-26038-8 }}</ref> This removal of citizens' rights was instrumental in the process of anti-semitic persecution: the process of [[denaturalization]] allowed the Nazis to exclude—''[[de jure]]''—Jews from the "''Volksgemeinschaft''" ("national community"), thus granting judicial legitimacy to their persecution and opening the way to harsher laws and, eventually, extermination of the Jews. Philosopher [[Hannah Arendt]] pointed out this important judicial aspect of the [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]] in ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]'' (1951), where she demonstrated that to violate [[human rights]], Nazi Germany first deprived human beings of their citizenship. Arendt underlined that in the [[Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen]], citizens' rights actually preceded human rights, as the latter needed the protection of a determinate state to be actually respected.

The drafting of the [[Nuremberg Laws]] has often been attributed to [[Hans Globke]]. Globke co-authored several aspects of the laws, such as the ordinance which legally required Jews with non-Jewish names to take on the additional first names Israel or Sara, along with the official legal commentary on the Reich Citizenship Law.<ref name="wistrich2002" />

[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101III-Duerr-053-29, Lettland, KZ Salaspils, Essensausgabe.jpg|thumb|left|Jewish prisoners are issued food on a building site at [[Salaspils concentration camp]], Latvia, in 1941.]]

In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them from having any influence in education, politics, higher education, and industry. There was now nothing to stop the anti-Jewish actions that spread across the German economy.

Between 1937 and 1938, new laws were implemented, and the [[racial segregation|segregation]] of Jews from the "German Aryan" population was completed. In particular, Jews were punished financially for being Jewish.

From March 1, 1938, government contracts could not be awarded to Jewish businesses. On September 30, "Aryan" doctors could only treat "Aryan" patients. Provision of medical care to Jews was already hampered because Jews were banned from being doctors.

On August 17, Jews with first names of non-Jewish origin were legally required to add "Israel" (males) or "Sara" (females) to their names, and a large letter "J" was to be printed on their passports on October 5.<ref name="wistrich2002" /> On November 15, Jewish children were banned from going to state-run schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or been persuaded to sell out to the government, further reducing their rights as human beings; they were, in many ways, effectively separated from the German populace.

The increasingly [[totalitarian]] regime that Hitler imposed on Germany allowed him to control the actions of the military. On November 7, 1938, a young Polish Jew named [[Herschel Grynszpan]] attacked and shot German diplomat [[Ernst vom Rath]] in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan's family, together with more than 12,000 Polish-born Jews, had been expelled by the Nazi government from Germany to Poland in the so-called "''[[Polenaktion]]''" on October 28, 1938. [[Joseph Goebbels]] ordered retaliation. On the night of November 9, the [[SS]] and [[Sturmabteilung|SA]] conducted "the Night of Broken Glass" ("''[[Kristallnacht]]''"), in which at least 91 Jews were killed and a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in [[Nazi concentration camp]]s. After the start of the war, and the conquest of numerous European countries, the Jewish population was put into [[ghetto]]s, from which they were shipped to [[death camp]]s where they were murdered.

===Jewish responses to the Nuremberg Laws===
[[Image:Jewish Children in Nazi Germany Exercise Class.jpg|thumb|Gymnastics lesson in a Berlin Jewish school, 1936]]

After the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, the ''[[Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden]]'' (Representation of the German Jews) announced the following:

{{blockquote|The Laws decided upon by the Reichstag in Nuremberg have come as the heaviest of blows for the [[Jews in Germany]]. But they must create a basis on which a tolerable relationship becomes possible between the German and the Jewish people. The ''"Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden"'' is willing to contribute to this end with all its powers. A precondition for such a tolerable relationship is the hope that the Jews and Jewish communities of Germany will be enabled to keep a moral and economic means of existence by the halting of defamation and boycott.

The organization of the life of the Jews in Germany requires governmental recognition of an autonomous Jewish leadership. The ''Reichsvertretung der Juden'' in ''Deutschland'' is the agency competent to undertake this.

The most urgent tasks for the ''"Reichsvertretung"'', which it will press energetically and with full commitment, following the avenues it has previously taken, are:

Our own Jewish educational system must serve to prepare the youth to be upright Jews, secure in their faith, who will draw the strength to face the onerous demands which life will make on them from conscious solidarity with the Jewish community, from work for the Jewish present and faith in the Jewish future. In addition to transmitting knowledge, the Jewish schools must also serve in the systematic preparation for future occupations. With regard to preparation for emigration, particularly to [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]], emphasis will be placed on guidance toward manual work and the study of the [[Hebrew (language)|Hebrew]] language. The education and [[Hakhshara|vocational training]] of girls must be directed to preparing them to carry out their responsibilities as upholders of the family and mothers of the next generation.<ref>{{cite book|last=Yahil|first=Leni|title=The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945|url=https://archive.org/details/holocaustfateofe00yahi_0|url-access=limited|year=1998|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=0195045238|page=[https://archive.org/details/holocaustfateofe00yahi_0/page/79 79]}}</ref>}}

===Influence of American segregationist laws===
The Nazis had already barred Jews from having a role in Germany society as Lawyers, Civil Servants and Teachers with the 1933 [[Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service]] and led a systemic [[Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses|boycott of Jewish businesses]] (in addition to expulsion or exclusion from other professions, or the right to own stocks) before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were proposed but were looking for a means of codifying in a legal sense the exclusion of Jews (and other "non-Aryan" minorities) from both citizenship of the Reich, and therefore strip fundamental protections from the population.<ref name=BradsherNuremburg>{{Cite web |last=Bradsher |first=Greg |date=2010 |title=The Nuremberg Laws |url=https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/winter/nuremberg.html |website=www.archives.gov}}</ref><ref name=LindleyWhitman>{{cite web | last=Lindley | first=Robin | title=How the US influenced the creation of Nazi race laws under Hitler | website=ABA Journal | date=2023-02-07 | url=https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/yale-law-professor-james-whitman-discusses-how-the-us-influenced-the-creation-of-nazi-race-laws-under-hitler | access-date=2025-02-07}}</ref>

[[James Q. Whitman]], Professor of Law at Yale University, stated in his book "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law" that both historic US precedence and Jim Crow Era laws were openly discussed by Nazi party officials and lawyers as examples of how to legislate for racial segregation and against miscegenation that ultimately resulted in the [[Nuremberg Laws]] and the stripping of citizenship from German Jews with the [[Reich Citizenship Law]].<ref name=LittleWhitman>{{Cite web |last=Little |first=Becky |date=August 16, 2017 |title=How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow |url=https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow |website=History.com}}</ref><ref name=WilliamsWhitman>{{cite web |author=Thomas Christie Williams |title=Long Read Review: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman |website=lse.ac.uk |date=2017-08-25 |url=https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/08/25/long-read-review-hitlers-american-model-the-united-states-and-the-making-of-nazi-race-law-by-james-q-whitman/ |access-date=2025-02-07}}</ref><ref>{{cite web | last=Al-Arshani | first=Sarah | title=The Nazis studied US eugenics and Jim Crow laws as a model for their policies. When they were criticized, one historian says, 'they pointed to Mississippi.' | website=Business Insider | date=2022-09-21 | url=https://www.businessinsider.com/nazis-studied-us-eugenics-jim-crow-laws-model-policies-2022-9 | access-date=2025-02-07}}</ref>