Nuremberg Laws Term Analysis

The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in Nazi Germany in 1935, were antisemitic and racist laws created to protect the “purity” of the manufactured Aryan race in the Third Reich. They outlawed intermarriage between Aryans and Jews and declared that only Germans were considered citizens under the Third Reich. In this way, the laws paved the way for an exponential increase in violence against Jews and other minority ethnic groups, like Sinti, Roma, and Black Germans. The Nuremberg Laws were modeled in large part on American Jim Crow laws—but in some cases, even the Nazis felt that Americans’ definitions of what constituted a Black person were too extreme for their purposes. (For instance, some Americans believed that “‘an American man or woman who has even has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks.”) As the Third Reich progressed, the higher-ups within the Nazi Party continually created addendums to the laws that further marginalized Jewish people throughout Germany and the Reich’s occupied territories.