The Holocaust: The Nuremberg Laws and Their Role in Enabling Genocide
Overview
This paper examines the Nuremberg Laws enacted by Nazi Germany in 1935 and their significance in facilitating the Holocaust. The essay argues that the Nuremberg Laws legalized racism and persecution by stripping non-Aryans of citizenship and prohibiting intermarriage, thereby transforming Jews into aliens within German society and creating the legal framework that enabled the subsequent genocide of six million Jews and other minority groups between 1941 and 1945.
What this essay covers
- Introduction: Definition of the Holocaust and overview of the Nuremberg Laws
- Background of the Research: Historical context of the Holocaust and Hitler's racial ideology
- The Nuremberg Laws: Details of the Reich Citizenship Law and Protection of German Blood and German Honor Law
Preview
The Holocaust: The Nuremberg Laws
Enriquillo Abreu
LEH 354: Term paper
The Holocaust: The Nuremberg Laws
Introduction
The Holocaust was a period during the Second World War in which Nazi Germany and its collaborators propagated the genocide of Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is believed to have been perpetrated between 1941 and 1945 and resulted into the murder of over five million European Jews and other minority groups (Rees, 2017). The genocide of the European Jews was done for the most part through gas vans, gas chambers, mass shooting, pogroms and execution via hard labor in concentration camps. Most of these killings occurred in occupied Poland in Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, and Auschwitz (Wasserman, 2019; Lee, 2017). The Nuremberg Laws on the other hand were racist, anti-Semitic legislations enacted in Nazi Germany. These laws came into force in September of 1935 and were the work of the Reichstag (Heideman, 2016). The Nuremberg Laws included the Reich Citizenship law and the Protection of German Blood and German Honor law. The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health is sometimes considered part of the Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship law underlined that only persons with German blood could become Reich citizens. Consequently, any persons of non-Aryan ancestry was stripped off their citizenship. The Protection of German Blood and German Honor law on the other hand underlined that extramarital intercourse and marriages between Jews and Germans of Aryan decent was forbidden (Heideman, 2016). The law also stipulated that female Germans could not work in a Jewish household.