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Reinhard Heydrich
"Germany must be for [Jews] a country without a future in which the older residual generation can certainly die, but in which the young cannot live."1
-- --Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police, 1934
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Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 8, "The Nazi Connection."
• Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 1994, Chapter 3, "Germany in the 1920s."
• Elements of Time: Holocaust Testimonies (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 1989.
• Video: Childhood Experiences of German Jews (23 min., source: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts).
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Print and Video Resources
• The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann (Cambridge University Press) 1991.
• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) Chapter 2, 1994.
• Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988.
• Video: Camera of My Family: Four Generations in Germany 1845-1945 (18 min., source: Film Library).
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Overview
On September 15, 1935, the Nazis took new steps toward protecting "Aryan blood" from "contamination." This time, they moved against the nation's Jews and other "racial enemies." It was not the Nazis' first anti-Jewish measure. They proclaimed 42 in 1933 and 19 more in 1934. The new laws, which Hitler announced at a party rally in Nuremberg, provided the rationale for the earlier legislation. The first of these laws defined a citizen of the Reich as an inhabitant "who is of German or kindred blood and who, through his conduct, shows that he is both desirous and fit to serve the German people and Reich faithfully." The second statute was the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor." It outlawed marriages between Jews and citizens of German blood. Click here to read the two laws.
The new laws raised an important question: Who is a Jew? In November 1935, the Nazis defined a Jew as a person with two Jewish parents or three Jewish grandparents. Children with one Jewish parent were Jews if they practiced Judaism or married a Jew. A child of intermarriage who was not a Jew was a Mischling--a person of "mixed race." By isolating Jews from other Germans and forbidding the "mixing of races," the Nazis hoped that Mischlings would eventually disappear. Click here to view a poster celebrating the "Law for the Protection of Blood and German Honor."
The Nazis regarded the new laws as public health measures. German medical journals often described miscegenation as a "public health hazard." Hitler and other Nazi leaders heightened that notion by using such terms as "vermin," "rats," "a cancer on the body of the nation" to refer to Jews. The aim was to isolate Jews from their Christian neighbors, to quarantine them from "the healthy population." In time these same laws would be applied to "Gypsies" and Germans of African descent in similar ways.
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"The Search for Jews"
By 1936, at least a quarter of Germany's Jews were "deprived of their professional livelihood by boycott, decree, or local pressure," writes historian Martin Gilbert: More than ten thousand public health and social workers had been driven out of their posts, four thousand lawyers were without the right to practice, two thousand doctors had been expelled from hospitals and clinics, two thousand actors, singers and musicians had been driven from their orchestras, clubs and cafes. A further twelve hundred editors and journalists had been dismissed, as had eight hundred university professors and lecturers, and eight hundred elementary and secondary school teachers.
The search for Jews, and for converted Jews, to be driven out of their jobs was continuous. On 5 September 1935 the SS newspaper published the names of eight half-Jews and converted Jews, all of the Evangelical-Lutheran faith, who had been "dismissed without notice" and deprived of any further opportunity "of acting as organists in Christian churches." From these dismissals, the newspaper commented, "It can be seen that the Reich Chamber of Music is taking steps to protect the church from pernicious influence."2
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