As has been seen, the idea of a new citizenship law had been on Hitler’s mind from the outset of his regime. In July 1933 an Advisory Committee for Population and Race Policy at the Ministry of the Interior started work on draft proposals for a law designed to exclude the Jews from full citizenship rights.3 From the beginning of 1935, the signs pointing to such forthcoming changes multiplied. Allusions to them were made by various German leaders—Frick, Goebbels, and Schacht—during the spring and summer months of that year; the foreign press, particularly the London Jewish Chronicle and the New York Times, published similar information, and, according to Gestapo reports, German Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Joachim Prinz were openly speaking about a new citizenship law that would turn the Jews into “subjects” (Staatsangehörige); their information seemed precise indeed.4
Simultaneously, as has also been seen, mixed marriages were encountering increasing obstruction in the courts, to such an extent that, in July, Frick announced the formulation of new laws in this domain as well. In the same month the Justice Ministry submitted a proposal for the interdiction of marriages between Jews and Germans. From then on the issue was the object of ongoing interministerial consultations.5 Thus, whatever the immediate reason for Hitler’s decision may have been, both the issue of citizenship and that of mixed marriages were being discussed in great detail at the civil service level and within the party, and various signs indicated that new legislation was imminent. Incidentally, when Goebbels brought up the topic of “Jewish arrogance” in one of their conversations, Hitler cryptically remarked that “in many things there will soon be changes.”6
It has been suggested by historians who emphasize the haphazardness of Nazi measures that until September 13, Hitler had been planning to make a major foreign policy statement about the situation in Abyssinia, but that he was dissuaded at the last moment by Foreign Minister Neurath. This hypothesis is not supported by any proof, except for dubious testimony at the Nuremberg Trials by the Interior Ministry’s “race specialist,” Bernhard Lösener. (In the courtroom it was in Lösener’s interest to show that there had been no prolonged planning for the 1935 racial laws, for he would necessarily have been involved in such planning.)7
In his opening address of September 11 at the Nuremberg party congress, Hitler warned that the struggle against the internal enemies of the nation would not be thwarted by failings of the bureaucracy: The will of the nation—that is, the party—would, if necessary, take over in case of bureaucratic deficiency. It was in these very terms that Hitler ended his September 15 closing speech by addressing the solution of the Jewish problem. Thus it seems that the basic motive for pressing forward with anti-Jewish legislation was to deal with the specific internal political climate already alluded to.
In the precarious balance that existed between the party on the one hand and the state administration and the Reichswehr on the other, Hitler had in 1934 favored the state apparatus by decapitating the SA. Moreover, at the beginning of 1935, when tension arose between the Reichswehr and the SS, Hitler “warned the party against encroachments on the army and called the Reichswehr ‘the sole bearer of arms.’”8 It was time to lean the other way, especially since discontent was growing within the lower party ranks. In short, the Nuremberg laws were to serve notice to all that the role of the party was far from over—quite the contrary. Thus, the mass of party members would be assuaged, individual acts of violence against Jews would be stopped by the establishment of clear “legal” guidelines, and political activism would be channeled toward well-defined goals. The summoning of the Reichstag and the diplomatic corps to the party congress was meant as an homage to the party on the occasion of its most important yearly celebration, irrespective of whether the major declaration was to be on foreign policy, on the German flag, or on the Jewish issue. The preliminary work on the Jewish legislation had been completed, and Hitler could easily switch to preparation of the final decrees at the very last moment.
The conditions under which the drafting of the laws took place are known from another report by Lösener, this one written in 1950, which describes the drafting of the decrees on the last two days of the congress.9 There was no reason for Lösener to offer a false picture of these two hectic days, except for the suppression of the fact that much preliminary work had been accomplished before then. According to Lösener, on the evening of September 13, he and his Interior Ministry colleague, Franz Albrecht Medicus, were urgently summoned from Berlin to Nuremberg. There, State Secretaries Pfundtner and Stuckart informed them that Hitler, who considered the flag law an insufficient basis for convening the Reichstag, ordered the preparation of a law dealing with marriage and extramarital relations between Jews and Aryans, and with the employment of Aryan female help in Jewish families. The next day Hitler demanded a citizenship law broad enough to underpin the more specifically racial-biological anti-Jewish legislation. The party and particularly such individuals as Gerhardt Wagner, Lösener wrote, insisted on the most comprehensive definition of the Jew, one that would have equated even “quarter Jews” (Mischlinge of the second degree) with full Jews. Hitler himself demanded four versions of the law, ranging from the least (version D) to the most inclusive (version A). On September 15, at 2:30 A.M., he declared himself satisfied with the draft proposals.10
Hitler chose version D. But in a typical move that canceled this apparent “moderation” and left the door open for further extensions in the scope of the laws, Hitler crossed out a decisive sentence introduced into the text by Stuckart and Lösener: “These laws are applicable to full Jews only.” That sentence was meant to exclude Mischlinge from the legislation; now their fate also hung in the balance. Hitler ordered that the Stuckart-Lösener sentence be retained in the official announcement of the laws disseminated by the DNB, the official German news agency.”11 He probably did this to assuage foreign opinion and possibly those sectors of the German population directly or indirectly affected by the laws, but the sentence was to be absent from all further publications of the full text.
There is a plausible reason why, if Hitler was planning to announce the laws at the Nuremberg party congress, he waited until the very last moment to have the final versions drafted: his method was one of sudden blows meant to keep his opponents off balance, to confront them with faits accomplis that made forceful reactions almost impossible if a major crisis was to be avoided. Had the anti-Jewish legislation been submitted to him weeks before the congress, technical objections from the state bureaucracy could have hampered the process. Surprise was of the essence.
During the days and weeks following Nuremberg, party radicals close to the Wagner line exerted considerable pressure to reintroduce their demands regarding the status of Mischlinge into the supplementary decrees to the two main Nuremberg Laws. Hitler himself was to announce the ruling on “Mischlinge of the first degree” at a closed party meeting scheduled for September 29 in Munich. The meeting did take place, but Hitler postponed the announcement of his decision.12 In fact, the confrontation on the issue of the Mischlinge between the party radicals Wagner and Gütt (the latter formally belonged to the Ministry of the Interior) on the one hand, and the Interior Ministry specialists Stuckart and Lösener on the other, lasted from September 22 to November 6, with Hitler’s opinion being requested several times by both sides.13
Early in the debate both sides agreed that three-quarter Jews (persons with three Jewish grandparents) were to be considered Jews, and that one-quarter Jews (one Jewish grandparent) were Mischlinge. The entire confrontation focused on the status of the half Jews (two Jewish grandparents). Whereas the party wanted to include the half Jews in the category of Jews, or at least have a public agency decide who among them was a Jew and who a Mischling, the ministry insisted on integrating them into the Mischlinge category (together with the one-quarter Jews). The final decision, made by Hitler, was much closer to the demands of the ministry than to those of the party. Half Jews were Mischlinge; only as a result of their personal choice (not as the r
esult of the decision of a public agency), either by choosing a Jewish spouse or joining the Jewish religious community, did they become Jews.14
The supplementary decrees were finally published on November 14. The first supplementary decree to the Citizenship Law defined as Jewish all persons who had at least three full Jewish grandparents, or who had two Jewish grandparents and were married to a Jewish spouse or belonged to the Jewish religion at the time of the law’s publication, or who entered into such commitments at a later date. From November 14 on, the civic rights of Jews were canceled, their voting rights abolished; Jewish civil servants who had kept their positions owing to their veteran or veteran-related status were forced into retirement.15 On December 21 a second supplementary decree ordered the dismissal of Jewish professors, teachers, physicians, lawyers, and notaries who were state employees and had been granted exemptions.
The various categories of forbidden marriages were spelled out in the first supplementary decree to the Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor: between a Jew and a Mischling with one Jewish grandparent; between a Mischling and another, each with one Jewish grandparent; and between a Mischling with two Jewish grandparents and a German (the last of these might be waived by a special exemption from the Minister of the Interior or the Deputy Führer).16Mischlinge of the first degree (two Jewish grandparents) could marry Jews—and thereby become Jews—or marry one another, on the assumption that such couples usually chose to remain childless, as inidicated by the empirical material collected by Hans F. K. Günther.17 Finally, female citizens of German blood employed in a Jewish household at the time of the law’s publication could continue their work only if they had turned forty-five by December 31, 1935.18
In a circular addressed to all relevant party agencies on December 2, Hess restated the main instructions of the November 14 supplementary decree to explain the intention behind the marriage regulations that applied to both kinds of Mischlinge: “The Jewish Mischlinge, that is, the quarter and half Jews, are treated differently in the marriage legislation. The regulations are based on the fact that the mixed race of the German-Jewish Mischlinge is undesirable under any circumstances—both in terms of blood and politically—and that it must disappear as soon as possible.” According to Hess, the law ensured that “either in the present or in the next generation, the German-Jewish Mischlinge would belong either to the Jewish group or to that of the German citizens.” By being allowed to marry only full-blooded German spouses, the quarter Jews would become Germans and, as Hess put it, “the hereditary racial potential of a nation of 65 million would not be changed or damaged by the absorption of 100,000 quarter Jews.” The Deputy Führer’s explanations regarding the half Jews were somewhat more convoluted, as there was no absolute prohibition of their marrying Germans or quarter Jews, if they received the approval of the Deputy Führer. Hess recognized that this aspect of the legislation went against the wishes of the party, declaring laconically that the decision had been taken “for political reasons.” The general policy, however, was to compel half Jews to marry only Jews, thus to absorb them into the Jewish group19—evidence of Hitler’s wish, as stated to Walter Gross, for the disappearance of the Mischlinge.
To how many people did the Nuremberg Laws apply? According to statistics produced by the Ministry of the Interior on April 3, 1935, living in Germany at the time were some 750,000 Mischlinge of the first and second degree. In this document, signed by Pfundtner and submitted to Hitler by his military adjutant, Col. Friedrich Hossbach, it was not clear how this total had been arrived at. (The ministry, in fact, admitted that there was no precise method for making such an estimate.) Apart from the Mischlinge, the document also listed 475,000 full Jews belonging to the Jewish religion and 300,000 full Jews not belonging to it, which made a total of approximately 1.5 million, or 2.3 percent of the population of Germany. A further figure was mentioned, probably at Hitler’s demand: Within this total there were 728,000 men, among them about 328,000 of military age.20
Even after the proclamation of the laws and the first supplementary decrees in November, Rudolf Hess had the numbers wrong in his circular, giving 300,000 as the overall total of Mischlinge.21 This number was also an exaggeration.
Recent studies have set the number of Mischlinge at the time of the decrees at about 200,000.22 A detailed demographic inquiry conducted by the CV Zeitung (the newspaper of the Central Association of German Jews) and published on May 16, 1935, had reached the same result. According to the CV inquiry, some 450,000 full Jews (with four Jewish grandparents and belonging to the Jewish religion) were living in Germany at the time. “Non-Jewish non-Aryans”—among them converted full Jews and converted Mischlinge with one to three Jewish grandparents—numbered some 250,000. As the author of the inquiry included 50,000 converted full Jews and 2,000 converted three-quarter Jews in his statistics, the numbers according to the Nuremberg degree-categories became the following: full Jews (in racial terms): approximately 502,000 (450,000 plus 50,000 plus 2,000); half Jews: 70,000 to 75,000; quarter Jews: 125,000 to 130,000; total Mischlinge: 195,000 to 205,000. (In the CV inquiry the half Jews were all converted Jews, and thus, according to the Nuremberg Laws, would not have been counted as Jews but as Mischlinge of the first degree.)23
II
“In Germany,” according to a book published in 1936 by Lösener and Knost, “the Jewish question is simply the race question. How this came about,” the authors went on, “need not be described here once again. Here we are dealing only with the solution to this question which has now been decisively set in motion and which represents one of the basic prerequisites for the construction of the new Reich. According to the Führer’s will, the Nuremberg Laws are not measures intended to breed and perpetuate race hatred, but measures which mean the beginning of an easing in the relations between the German and the Jewish peoples.” Zionism had the right understanding of the issue, the authors asserted, and in general the Jewish people, itself so intent on preserving the purity of its blood over the centuries, should welcome laws intended to defend purity of blood.24
The main commentary on the “German racial legislation,” published that same year, was coauthored by Secretary of State (in the Ministry of the Interior) Wilhelm Stuckart, and another official from the same ministry, Hans Globke, whose passion for identifying Jews by their names will be encountered later.25 It reveals starkly some of the most perplexing aspects—even from the Nazi viewpoint—of the Nuremberg Laws. In order to illustrate the absolute validity of religious affiliation as the criterion for identifying the race of the descendants, Stuckart and Globke gave the hypothetical example of a woman, fully German by blood, who had married a Jew and converted to Judaism and then, having been widowed, returned to Christianity and married a man fully German by blood. A grandchild deriving from this second marriage would, according to the law, be considered partly Jewish because of the grandmother’s one-time religious affiliation as a Jew. Stuckart and Globke could not but state the following corollary: “Attention has to be given to the fact that…[in] terms of racial belonging, a full-blooded German who converted to Judaism is to be considered as German-blooded after that conversion as before it; but in terms of the racial belonging of his grandchildren, he is to be considered a full Jew.”26
The racial mutation caused by such temporary contact with the Jewish religion is mysterious enough. But the mystery is compounded when it is remembered that in Nazi eugenics or racial anthropology, the impact of environmental factors was considered negligible in comparison with the effect of heredity. Here, however, an ephemeral change in environment mysteriously causes the most lasting biological transformation.27 But whatever their origins, racial differences could lead to dire consequences in cases of prolonged mixing:
“The addition of foreign blood to one’s own brings about damaging changes in the body of the race because the homogeneity, the instinctively certain will of the body, is thereby weakened; in its stead an uncertain, hesitating attitude appears in all decisive
life situations, an overestimation of the intellect and a spiritual splitting. A blood mixture does not achieve a uniform fusion of two races foreign to each other but leads in general to a disturbance in the spiritual equilibrium of the receiving part.”28
Two laws directed against individuals and groups other than Jews followed the September laws. The first of these was the October 18, 1935, Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People, which aimed at registering “alien races” or racially “less valuable” groups and imposed the obligation of a marriage license certifying that the partners were (racially) “fit to marry.”29 This law was reinforced by the first supplementary decree to the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor of November 14, which also forbade Germans to marry or have sexual relations with persons of “alien blood” other than Jews. Twelve days later a circular from the Ministry of the Interior was more specific: Those referred to were “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards.”30
Proof that one was not of Jewish origin or did not belong to any “less valuable” group became essential for a normal existence in the Third Reich. And the requirements were especially stringent for anyone aspiring to join or to remain in a state of party agency. Even the higher strata of the civil service, the party, and the army could not escape racial investigation. The personal file of Gen. Alfred Jodl, who was soon to become deputy chief of staff of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, contains a detailed family tree in Jodl’s handwriting, which, in 1936, proved his impeccable Aryan descent as far back as the mid-eighteenth century.31
Exceptions were rarely made. The best-known case was that of the state secretary at the Aviation Ministry, Erhard Milch, a Mischling of the second degree who was turned into an Aryan. Incidentally, such rare occurrences rapidly became known, even among the general population. Thus, in December 1937, charges were brought against a Father Wolpert, of Dinkelsbuhl, in Bavaria, because he had stated in a religion class that General Milch was of Jewish origin.32 In every such matter the final decision rested with Hess and often with Hitler himself. Whether Hess consulted Hitler in every instance is hard to know; that he consulted him in highly visible ones is probable. It is unlikely, for example, that Hess decided alone—a few days after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, and after Hitler had told Lammers that he would no longer agree to any exceptions regarding persons of Jewish descent—to issue a “protection letter” for the geopolitician Karl Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, a Mischling of the second degree according to the Nuremberg Laws.33 Sometimes Hitler’s hypochondriacal worries played a role. It will be remembered that the cancer researcher and “Mischling of the first degree” Otto Warburg was transformed into a “Mischling of the second degree” on Göring’s orders. Something similar occurred in early 1937, when a professor of radiology at the clinic of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Henri Chaoul—who, according to one investigation, was descended from Syrian Maronites and Greek Cypriots, and to another, more plausible one, “was not Aryan in the sense of the Civil Service Law” (in other words, was of Jewish origin)—was shielded from any difficulties on Hitler’s explicit demand, and appointed director of a newly established central radiology institute in Berlin.34
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