THE NUREMBERG LAWS
Ben S. Austin
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.