Reich Citizenship Law

The Reich Citizenship Law transformed racial classification into a test of legal membership in Germany. Introduced at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, it stripped German Jews of citizenship and associated rights beginning in January 1936, while later legislation extended restrictions across nearly every aspect of Jewish life. Its place in the book also sharpens a contrast: as the Washington crew prepared to represent the United States of America in Berlin, its members understood their own collective identity through shared values and mutual reliance rather than a state-imposed racial definition.

Enactment at Nuremberg

The law was introduced by Adolf Hitler on the evening of September 15, during the seventh annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, which was themed the Rally for Freedom. The Reichstag had been assembled there for the first time since 1543 to pass, in a conspicuous public display, a law making the Nazi Party emblem the official German flag. Hitler introduced two further laws that night; the Reich Citizenship Law was one of them. The rally’s language of freedom thus accompanied legislation that narrowed who could belong to the political community.

The law defined citizens by German or related ancestry and by demonstrated willingness and fitness to serve the German people and Reich. In the book’s account, the definition’s exclusions mattered as much as its stated criteria: German nationals who did not meet the ancestry requirement were relegated to the lesser status of state subjects. The distinction made citizenship conditional, rather than a status shared equally by German nationals.

Deprivation and Legal Expansion

Beginning in January 1936, the law’s effect was to strip German Jews of citizenship and the rights attached to it. It therefore formalized a loss of protection and standing that had already been developing through Nazi rule. The law did not stand alone: at the same rally, the separate Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews, invalidated marriages that defied the ban even if contracted abroad, and prohibited sexual relations between them. It also barred Jews from employing German women under forty-five in their homes and from displaying the newly established national flag. These provisions belonged to the companion Blood Law, not to the Reich Citizenship Law itself.

The measures enacted at Nuremberg were an opening stage rather than a completed code. In the following months and years, the Reichstag added dozens of further laws restricting Jewish life. The cumulative direction, as the narrative describes it, was toward making Jewish identity itself effectively illegal. The citizenship distinction supplied a fundamental legal division; subsequent restrictions enlarged its reach into daily life.

Persecution Before the Law

The Nuremberg legislation intensified a campaign already underway since the Nazi Party’s assumption of power in 1933. German Jews had been excluded through law, intimidation, and violence from the civil service and public office, from professions including medicine, law, and journalism, and from stock exchanges. They were also barred from many public and private places. Signs declaring Jews unwelcome appeared at hotels, pharmacies, restaurants, swimming pools, and shops, while Jewish-owned businesses faced extensive state-sponsored boycotts. By 1935, perhaps half of German Jews had lost their means of livelihood. The law therefore codified and extended an established pattern of exclusion rather than initiating persecution from nothing.

Citizenship and the Washington Crew

The law’s definition of belonging stands in sharp narrative contrast to the Washington crew’s changing sense of what it represented. In Times Square, a former Columbia oarsman recognized Shorty Hunt from a newspaper photograph and told the boys that their achievements had persuaded him to send his son west for college. The encounter helped the rowers understand that they were becoming more than representatives of the University of Washington: they were America’s crew, soon to wear USA in place of the W on their jerseys.

Joe Rantz’s view from the Empire State Building deepened that realization. Looking across New York toward the Statue of Liberty, he understood that he and his teammates were about to sail toward a place where liberty was under assault. The crew’s national representation, in the book’s account, rested not only on liberty but also on trust, mutual respect, humility, fair play, and care for one another—values the boys would take to Berlin. This is a juxtaposition in the narrative, not a claim that the crew enacted a direct response to the law.

Their understanding of membership was made concrete in the days before the race. As the rowers noticed one another’s tension, they drew together, discussed how to improve each stroke, and treated the coming contest as something no one wanted to waste for the others. When Don Hume was too ill to row the final, the crew went together to Al Ulbrickson to insist that he belonged in the boat: they regarded him as indispensable to its rhythm and to their shared effort. Joe’s eventual decision to trust every teammate in the final meters carried that principle into action. Set beside the Reich Citizenship Law, these episodes expose two sharply different grounds of belonging: a state’s racialized legal boundary and a crew’s reciprocal commitment, formed through dependence on one another.