Nuremberg: racial exclusion becomes law
Story period: September 1935
Location: Nuremberg, Germany
At the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, the regime announced laws excluding German Jews from full citizenship and forbidding marriage between Jews and other Germans. Adopted on 15 September 1935, they turned Nazi racial ideology into a framework of state discrimination.
A party spectacle, a state decision
15 September 1935
The regime used legislation as well as intimidation.
The Reichstag adopted the Nuremberg Laws while the Nazi leadership gathered for its annual party rally. The announcement connected a public celebration of Nazi power with a change to people’s legal status. These were state measures, not merely slogans used by party supporters.
The citizenship law denied Jews citizenship rights; the marriage law prohibited marriages between Jews and other Germans. Rights were being made dependent on the regime’s racial categories.
Persecution did not begin here
1933–1938
The laws intensified an existing process of exclusion.
Hitler’s government had already targeted Jews through boycotts and restrictions on employment. The 1935 laws fitted into that wider dismantling of equality. Further exclusions and the violence of the November 1938 pogrom followed.
Wartime persecution developed into the Holocaust. The Nazi regime profile connects the laws to dictatorship and racial ideology.
The marker identifies the city, not the precise building or location where the laws were announced. The present-day city reference point comes from open Wikidata records.
Explore further
- Nuremberg Laws
The laws announced at the party rally.