sep 15, 1935 - Nuremberg Laws

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The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935. They included the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani and Black people, classifying them as "enemies of the race-based state."

Prosecutions under the two laws did not begin until after the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Nazis began to implement antisemitic policies, including the formation of a Volksgemeinschaft based on race. Adolf Hitler declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933, and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excluded non-Aryans from the legal profession, 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.

The Nuremberg Laws had a crippling economic and social impact on the Jewish community. Persons convicted of violating the marriage laws were imprisoned, and upon completion of their sentences, they were re-arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Non-Jews gradually stopped socializing with Jews or shopping in Jewish-owned stores, and 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. Mass deportation schemes like the Madagascar Plan proved impossible for the Nazis to carry out, and the German government started mass exterminations of European Jews starting in mid-1941.

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