5 - Racial Legislation

Summary

With Hitler’s nomination to Reich Chancellor in January 1933, the opportunity arrived to implement Nazi racial doctrine. From the outset, the Führer state deliberately took legal measures for realizing its conception of a racially pure ethnic community, as outlined in the Party program’s anti-Jewish directives. This chapter explores the theoretical background of the regime’s racial ideology and antisemitism, which culminated in the plan to annihilate European Jewry. Of special concern here is to show how high-ranking officials in the ministerial bureaucracy were not only well-informed about the regime’s increasingly radical policies, but that they interacted with the SS in the transition to mass murder. The administrative regulations enacted during the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws reach deeply into the genocidal period, which undermines the well-known argument that the ministerial bureaucracy tried to hamper the so-called “Final Solution.”