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The Nuremberg Laws

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The Nuremberg Laws:
A Giant Step Backward Josh Portnoy
The West and the World
Period 7
5/10/13

In 1935, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party’s anti-Semitic ideas were gaining strength in many parts of Germany. Many restaurants and department stores displayed signs that forbade Jews from entering, and some areas of Germany banned Jews from using public transportation or public parks. Thousands of Jewish teachers and civil servants had been laid off, national boycotts enforced by paramilitary forces regularly barred Germans from buying from Jewish businesses, and citizens were discouraged from visiting Jewish doctors and lawyers. These actions were intended to cause a mass emigration of Jews from Germany. During the annual Nazi Party Rally held in Nuremberg in September 1935, Adolf Hitler passed two new laws, the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. These laws—to be know as the “Nuremberg Laws”-- deprived Jews of German citizenship and many civil rights. Unresolved in the initial Nuremberg Laws were the actual definition of Jews. The first of thirteen supplementary decrees, all designating the biological composition of Jewish blood, was published on November 14, l935, and defined Jews in terms of their lineage. These laws enforced a new morality on Germans that made it acceptable to ostracize, discriminate, and expel Jews from society. According to Hitler, the Nuremberg Laws were just a precursor to other much more degrading decrees. These laws allowed Adolf Hitler to get close to his goal of getting rid of the “parasite” and imposing racial conformity on society. The Nuremberg Laws were the first attempt by the German government to define the Jew, and the first step towards the annihilation of the Jews in Germany. Even before the Nuremberg

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