Legalized deprivation of rights: on the legal construction of dismissal and expulsion under National Socialism

Abstract

In order to provide adeeper understanding of the mechanisms and background leading to the persecution and expulsion, particularly of physicians labelled as "Jewish" in Nazi Germany, this article outlines their gradual disenfranchisement, through laws and decrees in the years 1933-1939. As the publicly visible terror immediately after the Nazi takeover was rejected in large parts of society, the regime resorted early on to supposedly legal forms of exclusion. With the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7April 1933, "non-Aryan" (§ 3) and politically unreliable (§ 4) persons could be removed from office, if necessary, even without any further comment (§ 6). However, regulations for long-standing civil servants as well as the "front-line fighter privilege" reduced the desired effect, e.g. in university medicine in away that was not intended by those in power. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, as part of the so-called Nuremberg Laws introduced the criterion of "German blood". This resulted in asecond large wave of dismissals. Outside the universities, aplethora of further defamatory legal norms, from the regulation on the approval of physicians for activities with the health insurances and the Law on Honorary Appointments (both in 1933), the so-called Flag Decree (1937) and withdrawal of the approbation (1938), aimed at the gradual "elimination" of Jewish physicians, which for many of them ended in extermination in the Holocaust. This practice implemented over years was based on ajurisdiction devised especially for that purpose and in hindsight it has been perfectly defined as "legal injustice".