The original copy of the Nuremberg Laws, pilfered by General George S. Patton and kept at the Huntington Library in California, have been transferred to the U.S. National Archives this week. The four pages of 1935 legislation, signed by Adolph Hitler, deprived Jewish citizens of most of their legal rights and forbade non-Jews from relationships with Jews.

The laws are justly noted and reviled for the legal persecution they introduced of the German Jews, leading a few years later to the holocaust.

We think that it is also important to remember that these laws were adopted in a fully legal manner by a democratically elected parliament in a modern European country during peacetime.

It is also worth pointing out that they exemplify the ability of the modern state to control the lives of its citizens to such a frightening degree through mere legislative paperwork.

These two points should serve to remind us all of the potential dangers that are present even in modern democracies.

Democracy in Action

With the examples of Democratization efforts around the world in the past decade, it has increasingly become evident that a democratic political system on its own is not a guarantee for responsible or just behavior by an elected government. Democracy, when it lacks a solid basis of societal agreement about what is proper and just, can easily be subverted or fail entirely, leading to ethnic cleansing, police terror, puppet states and corruption in Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

The Nuremberg Laws were a product of an ostensibly democratic and legal government and parliament (the Reichstag). From their titles such as “The Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935 “, to the opening phrase “The Reichstag has adopted by unanimous vote the following law which is herewith promulgated” one sees that this law was issued through Germany’s democratically elected parliament, using the due process of legislative law. Glancing at down to the bottom of the page, one can see they are signed not only by “The Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler” but also by Minister of the Interior Frick, Minister of Justice Dr. Gürtner, and Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess.  

Once legislated, these terrible laws were put into action not by Nazi storm troopers or Gestapo agents. They were carried out by the regular police, the civilian courts of law, and by government institutions, all bound to obey the legally enacted law and enforce it.

The Power of Paperwork

A piece of legislation could instantly deprive hard-working, loyal, native-born citizens of their rights and of their citizenship itself. At a stroke, people whose families had lived in the country for hundreds of years and who had served honorably in the wartime military were made into aliens. This was not based on anything wrong they had done, or even their parents had done – it was based on nothing more then the supposed racial identity of their law-abiding grandparents.

By enacting a simple law forbidding the registration by the legal system of marriages between non-Jews and Jews, the state could outlaw love and force citizens to marry only those it approved of. A second paragraph could even make sex between a couple with the wrong type of grandparents an illegal act punishable by imprisonment and hard labor.

Provenance

 General George S. Patton, a man we commemorate for his military brilliance, his memorable quotes, and the liberation by troops under his command of Nazi concentration camps, disregarded Eisenhower’s orders to turn in Nazi documents and instead took the original copy of the Nuremberg Laws back to his hometown in California when he came there for a visit in June 1945. Deposited in the local Huntington library, the documents were sourly missed by Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, who had to rely on a photo-stat copy of the original documents for their evidence. The National Archives have issued a video about the travels of these documents, titled Inside the Vaults - The Nuremberg Laws.

For Patton, there was no question of Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Denial. After his forces had captured the Ohrdruf and then the Buchenwald concentration camps, he had German civilians from neighboring towns forced to tour the camp and to witness the inhuman murders carried out in their name. He also had troops under his command who had not participated in their liberation brought to visit the death camps and see them with their own eyes. In his autobiography, “War as I knew it”, Patton records both these visiting programs and his own first-hand observations of Buchenwald.

Additional materials: a photo and translation of one of the Nuremberg Laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor".

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