Nuremberg Laws

(noun)

Antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder, mainly Jews, were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights.

Related Terms

Examples of Nuremberg Laws in the following topics:

  • The Holocaust

    • Initially, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

  • The Nuremberg Trials

    • The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany in 1945 and 1946 at the Palace of Justice.
    • The second set of trials of lesser war criminals was conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the U.S.
    • Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT); among the second set of trials were the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial.
    • Political authority for Germany had been transferred to the Allied Control Council which, having sovereign power over Germany, could choose to punish violations of international law and the laws of war.
    • The International Military Tribunal was opened on November 19, 1945, in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.

  • Genocide

    • The preamble to the CPPCG states that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history, but it was not until Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term during World War II and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations agreed to the CPPCG, which defined the crime of genocide under international law.

  • Courts

    • The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany.
    • In both common law and civil law legal systems, courts are the central means for dispute resolution, and it is generally understood that all persons have an ability to bring their claims before a court.
    • The system of courts that interpret and apply the law are collectively known as the judiciary.
    • A legal remedy is the means with which a court of law (usually in the exercise of civil law jurisdiction) enforces a right, imposes a penalty, or makes some other court order to impose its will.
    • At the Nuremberg Tribunals, the main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches), considered to be the most important surviving official in the Third Reich after Hitler's death.

  • The Hohenzollerns

    • The cadet Franconian branch of the House of Hohenzollern was founded by Conrad I, Burgrave of Nuremberg (1186-1261).
    • When Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, died without a son in 1618, his son-in-law John Sigismund, at the time the prince-elector of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, inherited the Duchy of Prussia.
    • Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg, also called Frederick VI of Nuremberg
    • In 1411 Frederick VI, Burgrave of Nuremberg was appointed governor of Brandenburg in order to restore order and stability.
    • When Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, died without a son in 1618, his son-in-law John Sigismund inherited the Duchy of Prussia.

  • Population Transfer

    • The view of international law on population transfer underwent considerable evolution during the 20th century.
    • The tide started to turn when the Charter of the Nuremberg Trials of German Nazi leaders declared that forced deportation of civilian populations was both a war crime and a crime against humanity.This opinion was progressively adopted and extended through the remainder of the century.
    • There is now little debate about the general legal status of involuntary population transfers, as forced population transfers are now considered violations of international law.
    • Adopted in 1949 and now part of customary international law, Article 49 of Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits mass movement of people out of or into of occupied territory under what it calls "belligerent military occupation":

  • German Woodcuts

    • The greatest artist of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, began his career as an apprentice to a leading workshop in Nuremberg, that of Michael Wolgemut, who had largely abandoned his painting to exploit the new medium.
    • Dürer worked on the most extravagantly illustrated book of the period, The Nuremberg Chronicle, published by his godfather Anton Koberger, Europe's largest printer-publisher at the time.
    • After completing his apprenticeship in 1490, Dürer traveled in Germany for four years and to Italy for a few months before establishing his own workshop in Nuremberg.

  • The Eugenics Movement

    • Eugenics was a prejudicial pseudoscience with roots in the late 19th and early 20th century that gained popularity and impacted American state and federal laws in the 1920s.
    • Laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation.
    • The first state to introduce a compulsory sterilization bill was Michigan in 1897, but the proposed law failed to garner enough votes by legislators to be adopted.
    • Laughlin wrote the Virginia model statute that was the basis for the Nazi Ernst Rudin's Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
    • When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after the war, however, they justified more than 450,000 mass sterilizations in less than a decade by citing United States Eugenics programs and policies as their inspiration.

  • The Kellogg-Briand Pact

    • The 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact was concluded outside the League of Nations, and remains a binding treaty under international law.
    • It has also served as one of the legal bases establishing international norms that threat or use military force in contravention of international law, as well as the territorial acquisitions resulting from it, is unlawful.
    • It was for committing this crime that the Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced a number of people responsible for starting World War II.

  • Early Jewish Art

    • Middle Age Rabbinical and Kabbalistic literature also contain textual and graphic art, most famously the illuminated haggadahs like the Sarajevo Haggadah, and manuscripts like the Nuremberg Mahzor.
    • The preserved frescoes include scenes such as the Sacrifice of Isaac, and other Genesis stories, Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law, Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, scenes from the Book of Esther, and many others.
    • Scholars think the paintings were used as an instructional display to educate and teach the history and laws of the religion.