German Reich Citizenship Law

The German Reich Citizenship Law made ancestry a condition of full political membership in Germany. Introduced by Adolf Hitler at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, it reclassified German Jews as subjects rather than citizens and helped turn antisemitic exclusion into state law.

Enactment at the Nuremberg Rally

On the evening of September 15, 1935, Adolf Hitler addressed the Reichstag, which had been assembled in Nuremberg to enact legislation and make its passage a public spectacle. The first measure made the Nazi Party emblem, the swastika, Germany’s official flag. Hitler then introduced two further laws: the German Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These latter measures, rather than the flag law, became the enduring substance of the 1935 rally’s legacy.

The setting tied legal change to political theater. The rally was presented under the name Rally for Freedom, even as the new citizenship measure narrowed who could belong to the German political community. Its language of national membership gave an official legal form to exclusion.

Criteria for Citizenship

The law defined citizens through two linked tests: a person had to be a German national of German or related blood and had to demonstrate willingness and fitness to serve the German people and Reich faithfully. Ancestry thus became a formal qualification for citizenship, while conduct was framed as a further condition of full status.

The law’s exclusionary force also lay in what it withheld. German nationals who did not meet its ancestry requirement were left outside the category of citizen and assigned the lesser status of state subjects. This distinction did not place them beyond state authority; instead, it denied them the rights associated with citizenship while leaving them subject to the state’s rule.

Effects on German Jews

Beginning in January 1936, the law stripped German Jews of citizenship and the rights attached to it. Its consequences therefore extended beyond a change in terminology: a population already targeted by state policy was formally deprived of full civic standing.

The accompanying Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor imposed further restrictions, including prohibitions on marriage between Jews and non-Jews and on Jews displaying the newly designated national flag. Those provisions belonged to the companion law, not the German Reich Citizenship Law itself, but their simultaneous introduction made the two measures part of a single legislative assault.

Place in the Wider System of Persecution

The citizenship law arrived after years of escalating exclusion. Since the Nazi Party’s assumption of power in 1933, German Jews had been barred from public service and public office, pushed out of professions including medicine, law, and journalism, excluded from stock exchanges, and denied access to many public and private places. Jewish-owned businesses had also faced state-sponsored boycotts; by 1935, perhaps half of German Jews had lost their livelihoods.

The new law did not mark the end of that process. In subsequent months and years, the Reichstag added dozens of restrictions affecting German Jews’ lives. The German Reich Citizenship Law was a decisive legal instrument within this widening system: it defined who could count as a citizen at the same time that state policy was stripping a targeted population of rights and means of livelihood.