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Original of the Nuremberg Laws on Display at the Auschwitz Memorial
For one day, it was possible to see the original Nuremberg Laws at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. On September 15, the anniversary of the promulgation of the laws during the 1935 Nazi party congress, an exhibition titled “Racist Madness: The 1935 Nuremberg Laws,” prepared by the Reichsparteitagsgelände documentation center in Nuremberg, opened in the temporary exhibition space in block no. 12. It will be opened until the end of October.
This document became the legal basis for the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich and was the cornerstone of everything that led to the Holocaust. Additional provisions added through 1943 successively limited and revoked the rights of citizens of Jewish descent. In the end, the Nazis confined all of the people they apprehended in ghettos and transit camps, from which they were deported to death camps.
The Nuremberg Laws, as a unique document excluding a group of people from society, was signed personally by Adolf Hitler. One original copy has been preserved in Nuremberg since the end of the war. Another came to light at the Huntingdon Library in California several years ago. Two documents, the “Law on Reich Citizenship” and the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” were presented in the original at the exhibition. Hans-Christian Taubrich, director of the Documentation Center in Nuremberg, introduced the documents at the opening and spoke about the idea of the exhibition and the discovery of the originals.
“For the first time, one of the main Nazi documents that started everything rolling that happened during the war is being shown in the place that is the symbol of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz,” said Taubrich. “The Nuremberg Laws are only four pages long. Additional new provisions and details were introduced until 1943. That means that, when the gas chambers were already operating here in Auschwitz, the Third Reich bureaucracy was using its brains the whole time to think up new anti-Jewish laws. The final, thirteenth amendment to the Nuremberg Laws states that Jews who leave Germany forfeit not only their citizenship but also all of their property. This was the ultimate legalization of the plunder and killing. Yet the most striking thing is not the fact that this legislation was promulgated at the party congress in 1935, but that this was the first of many steps that subsequently led to the place where we are now.”
The opening of the exhibition was also accompanied by a lecture by Dr. Marcin Marcinko of the Jagiellonian University on “Evaluating the Legality of the Nuremberg Laws from the Point of View of International Law.”
The exhibition will be open until October 31, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. from Monday through Friday, in the temporary exhibition space in block 12 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.
On the exhibition “Racist Madness: The 1935 Nuremberg Laws.”
Concept of the exhibition: Hans-Christian Taubrich
Scientific adviser: Dr. Volker Dahm, Instititue of Contemporary History; Dr. Eckart Dietzfelbinger
Realization: Muller-Rieger Exhibition Bureau, Munich
Photographs: German Historical Museum in Berlin, Museum of the City of Nuremberg, Pedagogical Institute in Nuremberg, Municipal Archive in Nuremburg, private collections and reproductions.
