The Nuremberg Laws Hitler's Laws, inside cover

A 1938 pocket edition of laws and regulations issued by Hitler in 1935, consisting of the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 and the Marriage Health Law of 18 October 1935.

The Nuremberg Race Laws were antisemitic laws introduced in Nazi Germany from September 1935 which regulated many areas of public life, civic rights and citizenship. The legislation was aimed at restricting civil rights of the Jewish population.

The two Nuremberg Laws were unanimously passed by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and forbade the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households. The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only those of ‘German or related blood’ were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights.

The Nazis rose to power in a period defined by national humiliation, political instability and economic hardship following the First World War. They exploited this widespread discontent to stoke ultranationalist ideologies, existing prejudices and the desire to find a scapegoat.

Jews, who had suffered persecution and systemic prejudice for centuries, were easy targets. Jewish hatreds became centred on flawed theories of ‘racial superiority’. The Nazis propagated these theories to discriminate against Jews and others they deemed ‘racially undesirable’.

From 1933 the Nazis implemented a series of racist and antisemitic laws designed to create a racially ‘pure’ state. The laws sanctioned the pseudo-scientific definition of having ‘German blood’ as the condition for Reich citizenship and civil rights, to the exclusion of others.