A) THE NUREMBERG LAWS:

The Congress of the National Socialist Workers' Party (NAZI) convened in Nuremburg, Germany on September 10, 1935. Among the many items of business on the Nazi agenda was the passage of a series of laws designed (a) to clarify the requirements of citizenship in the Third Reich, (b) to assure the purity of German blood and German honor and (b) to clarify the position of Jews in the Reich. These three laws, passed on September 15, 1935, and the numerous auxillary laws which followed them are called the Nuremberg Laws. They are reprinted here in their entirety. Please take special note of the similarity between these laws and the Jim Crow Laws which were passed in the United States following the Compromise of 1877, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) and remained in effect until the court reversed the "separate but equal doctrine in Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka (1954). It is clear that Hitler used the Jim Crow segregation statutes as his model for defining Jews in the Third Reich.

1) Law of Protection of the German Race: Hereditary Health. ( July 14, 1933).
Article I.

(1.) Anyone who suffers from an inheritable disease may be surgically sterilized if, in the judgement of medical science, it could be expected that his decendants will suffer from serious inherited mental or physical defects. (2.) Anyone who suffers from one of the following is to be regarded as inheritably diseased within the meaning of this law: 1. congenital feeble-mindedness 2. schizophrenia 3. manic-depression 4. congenital epilepsy 5. inheritable St. Vitus dance (Huntington's Chorea) 6. hereditary blindness 7. hereditary deafness 8. serious inheritable malformations (3.) In addition, anyone suffering from chronic alcoholism may also be sterilized.

Article II.

(1.) Anyone who requests sterilization is entitled to it. If he be incapacitated or under a guardian because of low state of mental health or not yet 18 years of age, his legal guardian is empowered to make the request. In other cases of limited capacity the request must receive the approval of the legal representative. If a person be of age and has a nurse, the latter's consent is required. (2.) The request must be accompanied by a certificate from a citizen who is accredited by the German Reich stating that the person to be sterilized has been informed about the nature and consequence of sterilization. (3.) The request for sterilization can be recalled.

Article III.

Sterilization may also be recommended by: (1.) the official physician (2.) the official in charge of a hospital, sanitarium, or prison.

Article IV.

The request for sterilization must be presented in writing to, or placed in writing by the office of the Health Inheritance Court. The statement concerning the request must be certified by a medical document or authenticated in some other way. The business office of the court must notify the official physician. Article VII. The proceedings of the Health Inheritance Court are secret.

Article X.

The Supreme Health Insurance Court retains final jurisdiction.

2) Law of Protection of the German Race: Citizenship. (September 15, 1935).

ARTICLE 1.

(1) A subject of the state is one who belongs to the protective union of the German Reich, and who, therefore, has specific obligations to the Reich. (2) The status of subject is to be acquired in accordance with the provisions of the Reich and the state Citizenship Law.

ARTICLE 2.

(1) A citizen of the Reich may be only one who is of German or kindred blood, and who, through his behavior, shows that he is both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally the German people and the Reich. (2) The right to citizenship is obtained by the grant of Reich citizenship papers. (3) Only the citizen of the Reich may enjoy full political rights in consonance with the provisions of the laws.

ARTICLE 3.

 The Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy to the Fuehrer, will issue the required legal and administrative decrees for the implementation and amplification of this law.

3) Law of  Protection of the German Race: German Blood and German Honor. (September 15, 1935).

SECTION 1 .

1. Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they are concluded abroad.

2. Proceedings for annulment may be initiated only by the Public Prosecutor.

SECTION 2.

 Relation outside marriage between Jews and nationals for German or kindred blood are forbidden.

SECTION 3 .

Jews will not be permitted to employ female nationals of German or kindred blood in their households.

SECTION 4 .

1. Jews are forbidden to hoist the Reich and national flag and to present the colors of the Reich.

2. On the other hand they are permitted to present the Jewish colors. The exercise of this authority is protected by the State.

SECTION 5 .

1. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 1 will be punished with hard labor.

2. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 2 will be punished with imprisonment or with hard labor.

3. A person who acts contrary to the provisions of section 3 or 4 will be punished with imprisonment up to a year and with a fine or with one of these penalties.

SECTION 6 .

The Reich Minister of the Interior in agreement with the Deputy of the Fuehrer will issue the legal and administrative regulations which are required fro the implementation and supplementation of this law.

SECTION 7 .

The law will become effective on the day after the promulgation, section 3 however only on 1 January, 1936.
 
 

B) THE FINAL SOLUTION:

1) Forced Emigration of German Jews.

The first major step leading to the "Final Solution" was the attempt on the part of the Nazi regime to force Jews to emigrate out of Germany. Hitler's motivation seems to have been two-fold: to ensure the racial purity of Germany and to create lebensraum, "living space," for German nationals of "Aryan" blood. Throughout the 1930's Nazi domestic policy was aimed at stripping Jews of any citizenship rights, economic and political rights. The first step toward a "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the complete dehumanization of the Jew.

2) The Ghettoization of European Jews: Deportation and "Resettlement.".
On September 1, 1939, Hitler's troops invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany -- World War II has begun. But, within three weeks, Poland has completely succumbed to Hitler's Blitzkrieg. In 1939 there were approximately 3.3 million Jews living in Poland (about 10% of the Polish population. One week before the invasion, Hitler signed a secret non-aggression pact (The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with Stalin. Under German occupation, Poland was divided into 10 administrative districts. The western and northern districts (Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony, Upper and Lower Silesia and Danzig) were annexed to the German Reich and the eastern districts were ceded to the Soviet Union. The largest district, the central section including the cities of Lublin Krakow and Warsaw, was set aside as a German colony and came to be known as the General Government (Generalgouvernement). So, with the conquest of Poland, an additional 2 million Polish Jews were brought under German control. The stunning victories of the German armies in the early years of World War II brought the majority of European Jewry under Nazi control. Consistently, Jews were deprived of human rights. Their property confiscated, most of them were herded into ghettos and concentration camps. The victories also increased Hitler's confidence that he could proceed with his plans with minimal opposition from the outside world.  Almost from the beginning of the campaign against Poland, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units were at work just behind the front lines. Over the next 18 months these units killed, either by shooting or by mobile gas vans, over 1,300,000 Jews. Hitler's long-standing commitment to lebensraum, or "living space," was an obsession almost as important as the solution of the Jewish "problem."

3) The Nazi Death Camps.
Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the highly rationalized gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945. The names of Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek are indelibly stamped on history. Following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, January 20, 1942, the "Final Solution" was an official policy and a major obsession of the Nazi regime. It was at that point that camps were constructed for the express purpose of rational mass extermination, principally of Jews, but of other groups as well.  Almost immediately following his rise to power, Hitler began the creation of concentration camps. Initially these were designed to incarcerate political prisoners (enemies of the regime), criminals and security risks. While conditions were, predictably, horrible in these camps, and while the death rates were high, there is no evidence that they were used for extermination purposes. By the late 1930s there were literally hundreds of camps scattered throughout Germany and with the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Holland and France, camps were established throughout the Reich. The death rates were so high, from malnutrition, typhus and exhaustion that the disposal of corpses became a serious problem.In Dachau, one of the largest camps in Germany proper, crematoria were constructed for disposal of corpses. There was also a gas chambers constructed at Dachau; however, there is no evidence to this point that they were ever used for extermination. Presumably, the crematoria displayed on the left were used for disposing of the corpses of those who perished from other causes. There were other execution devices at Dachau, such as a gallows, and presumably prisoners were executed and disposed of there.

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