The 1935 Nuremberg Rally was the setting for the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws, a decisive escalation in the legal persecution of German Jews. Staged under the ironic banner of freedom, the rally joined mass political spectacle to legislation that redefined citizenship and imposed racial restrictions, turning exclusion into an explicit program of the state.

Rally and spectacle

The Nazi Party held its seventh annual rally at Nuremberg under the theme of the Rally for Freedom. Hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and Blackshirts again gathered for the event. Leni Riefenstahl, then thirty-three and established as Adolf Hitler’s favored filmmaker, was there to document it. The footage that later emerged was limited to a short film about the war games Hitler staged at the rally, which dramatized Germany’s defiance of the Treaty of Versailles’ restrictions on German rearmament.

The rally’s climax came on the evening of September 15, when Hitler addressed the Reichstag. It had been assembled in Nuremberg for the first time since 1543, both to pass legislation and to make the act of passing it a public spectacle. Hitler introduced three laws. One made the Nazi Party emblem, the swastika, Germany’s official flag; the other two became the measures for which the 1935 rally would be remembered. The public ceremony gave legal change the force and visibility of a mass political event.

The laws and their effects

The Reich Citizenship Law defined citizens as German nationals of German or related blood who proved themselves willing and fit to serve the German people and Reich. By excluding people outside that racial definition from citizenship, it reduced them to subjects of the state. Beginning in January 1936, German Jews lost their citizenship and the rights associated with it.

The second measure, formally the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews and nullified such marriages even if they had been conducted abroad. It also prohibited extramarital sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, barred Jews from employing German women under forty-five in their homes, and forbade Jews from displaying the newly established national flag. Together, the citizenship and blood laws made racial classification the basis for determining legal status and regulating private as well as public life.

Escalation and historical significance

These measures did not begin the persecution. Since the Nazi Party’s assumption of power in 1933, German Jews had already been excluded by law, intimidation, and violence from civil-service work and public office, from professions including medicine, law, and journalism, from stock exchanges, and from numerous public and private places. State-sponsored boycotts targeted Jewish-owned businesses, and by 1935 perhaps half of German Jews had lost their livelihoods. The rally’s laws formalized and intensified an existing campaign of exclusion.

The legislation proved an opening stage rather than a limit. In the following months and years, the Reichstag added dozens of restrictions affecting nearly every aspect of Jewish life, until being Jewish was, in effect, outlawed. The contrast between the rally’s announced theme and its laws exposes the political meaning of the spectacle: a public performance of national unity accompanied the systematic removal of a targeted population from the protections and rights of citizenship. After the war, Riefenstahl spoke as little as possible about her participation; the event’s enduring historical association was not its staged war games, but the laws introduced on September 15.