Hitler

Jews. ‘Herr Schacht did not draw the logical conclusion,’ stated the Foreign Ministry’s report, ‘and demand a radical change in the party’s Jewish programme, nor even in the methods of applying it, for instance a ban on
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. On the contrary, he kept up the fiction of abiding a hundred per cent by the Jewish programme.’ Schacht’s meeting had clearly highlighted the differences between party and state, between radicals and pragmatists, between fanatics and conservatives. There was no fundamental disagreement about aims; merely about methods. However, the matter could not be allowed to drag on indefinitely. A resolution had to be found in the near future.
    The minutes of the meeting were sent to Hitler, who also discussed the matter with Schacht on 9 September. This was a day before Hitler left to join the hundreds of thousands of the party faithful assembled for the annual ritual in Nuremberg for the ‘Reich Party Rally of Freedom’ – ‘the High Mass of our party’, as Goebbels called it. It was not at that point with the intention of proclaiming the anti-Jewish ‘citizenship’ and ‘blood’ laws during the Party Rally. A significant part in their emergence was played by the lobbying at Nuremberg of one of the most fanatical proponents of a ban on sexual relations between Germans and Jews, Dr Gerhard Wagner, the Reich Doctors’ Leader, who had been advocating a ban on marriages between ‘aryans’ and Jews since 1933.
    Two days into the Party Rally, on 12 September, Wagner announced in a speech that within a short time a ‘Law to Protect German Blood’ would prevent the further ‘bastardization’ of the German people. A year later, Wagner claimed that he had no idea, when making his announcement, that the Führer would introduce the Nuremberg Laws within days. Probably Hitler had given Wagner no specific indication of when the ‘Blood Law’ would be promulgated. But since Wagner had unequivocally announced such a law as imminent, he must have been given an unambiguous sign by Hitler that action would follow in the immediate future. At any rate, late the very next evening, 13 September, Dr Bernhard Lösener, in charge of preparation of legislation on the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was, to his surprise, ordered to Nuremberg. He and a colleague, Ministerialrat Franz Albrecht Medicus, arrived in the morning of 14 September to be told by their superiors in the Interior Ministry, State Secretaries Hans Pfundtnerand Wilhelm Stuckart, that Hitler had instructed them the previous day to prepare a law to regulate the problems of marriage between ‘aryans’ and ‘non-aryans’. They had immediately begun work on a draft. It seems likely that the urging of Wagner, in Hitler’s company for hours at the crucial time and doubtless supported by other Nazi leaders, had been instrumental in the decision to bring in the long-desired law there and then. Wagner was the link between Hitler and those given the task of drafting the law, who were not altogether clear – since they had received no written instructions – on exactly what came from the Doctors’ Leader and what came from Hitler himself.
    The atmosphere was ripe. The summer of intimidation and violence towards Jews had seen to that. The increasingly shrill demands for action in the ‘Jewish Question’ formed a menacing backcloth to the highpoint of the party’s year as hundreds of thousands of the faithful arrived in Nuremberg, its walls, towers, and houses bedecked by swastika banners, the air full of expectancy at the great spectacle to follow.
    Preparations for the notorious laws which would determine the fate of thousands were little short of chaotic. Lösener and Medicus had arrived in Nuremberg on Saturday, 14 September. The specially summoned Reichstag meeting was scheduled for 8 p.m. the following day. There was little time for the already weary civil servants to draft the required legislation. Whatever the prior work on anti-Jewish legislation in the Ministries of the Interior and Justice had been, it had plainly not passed the initial stages. No definition of a Jew had been agreed upon. The party were pressing for inclusion of Mischlinge (those of mixed descent). But the complexities of this were considerable. The work went on at a furious pace. During the course of the day, Lösener was sent more than once to battle his way through the huge crowds to Frick, staying at a villa on the