“Rally for Freedom”
The Boys in the Boat“Rally for Freedom” was the theme given to the Nazi Party’s seventh annual rally at Nuremberg in 1935. The phrase’s force lies in the contrast between its promise and the laws introduced at the gathering: the rally’s climax was a public display of state power that stripped German Jews of citizenship and imposed sweeping restrictions on their lives.
The Rally's Theme
The rally brought storm troopers and Blackshirts to Nuremberg in the hundreds of thousands. Leni Riefenstahl, by then Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, was present to document the spectacle. The only footage that later emerged was a short film about the war games Hitler staged there to dramatize Germany’s defiance of the Treaty of Versailles’ ban on German rearmament.
The Irony of “Freedom”
On the evening of September 15, the rally reached its climax as Adolf Hitler addressed the Reichstag, assembled in Nuremberg for the first time since 1543. The Reichstag passed a law making the swastika the official German flag; Hitler also introduced the two laws for which the 1935 rally would be remembered. The Reich Citizenship Law defined citizenship in terms of German or related blood, relegating those outside that definition to the status of state subjects and stripping German Jews of citizenship and associated rights beginning in January 1936. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor barred marriages and extramarital sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, among other restrictions. Against these measures, the rally’s language of freedom reads as a pointed inversion: a public celebration of national unity accompanied the legal exclusion and subordination of German Jews.
Retrospective Meaning
The phrase is inseparable from the contradiction between the rally’s celebratory theme and the exclusionary laws announced there. The event was not remembered primarily for the war games filmed by Riefenstahl, but for what happened on September 15. After the war, she spoke as little as possible about her participation in the rally and later sought distance from the laws introduced at its climax. The name “Rally for Freedom” thus persists in the account as an ironic label for a gathering whose most consequential acts curtailed the rights of an entire population.
