Page "Racial policy of Nazi Germany" Paragraph 8

Between 1935 and 1936, persecution of the Jews increased apace while the process of " Gleichschaltung " ( lit.

: " standardisation ", the process by which the Nazis achieved complete control over German society ) was implemented.

In May 1935, Jews were forbidden to join the Wehrmacht ( the army ), and in the summer of the same year, anti-semitic propaganda appeared in shops and restaurants.

The Nuremberg Laws were passed around the time of the great Nazi rallies at Nuremberg ; on September 15, 1935, the " Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor " was passed, preventing marriage between any Jew and non-Jews as Rassenschande or racial pollution.

At the same time, the " Reich Citizenship Law " was passed and was reinforced in November by a decree, stating that all Jews, even quarter-and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their own country ( their official title became " subjects of the state ").

This meant that they were deprived of basic citizens ' rights, e. g., the right to vote.

This removal of citizens ' rights was instrumental in the process of anti-semitic persecution: the process of denaturalization allowed the Nazis to exclude — de jure — Jewish people from the " Volksgemeinschaft " (" national community "), thus granting judicial legitimacy to their persecution and opening the way to harsher laws and, eventually, extermination of the Jews.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out this important judicial aspect of the Holocaust in The Origins of Totalitarianism ( 1951 ), where she demonstrated that to violate human rights, Nazi Germany first deprived human beings of their citizenship.

Arendt underlined that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, citizens ’ rights actually preceded human rights, as the latter needed the protection of a determinate state to be actually respected.