In this excerpt from the Official Commentary on the Reich Citizenship Law, the centerpiece of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the high-ranking Nazi jurists Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke critique the ideals of classical liberalism and link citizenship rights to the “common blood” of the national Volk, or “people.”

In the individualistic-liberal conception … the primary element was the free and independent individual and the totality of all individuals in society. For this reason alone the state was worthy of protection because, through the “free play of forces,” it supposedly achieved the greatest possible happiness for the individual as well as for the sum of individuals…. Exercising a strict control over society, this juristic political personality, entirely cut off from the people, had to promote the free development of the individual and had to see to it that no one’s personal liberty was restricted…. With painstaking concern for the individual and his rights, the content of citizenship was discussed and precisely determined…. Above all, the principle of equality was most scrupulously guarded. Rights and duties were the same for every citizen….

The revolution in the conception of the state has perforce changed the concept, essence, and content of nationality and citizenship. National Socialism has put the people directly into the center of thought, faith, and will, of creativity and life….

The community of the people, sustained by a community of will and a community consciousness of [the] honor of the racially homogeneous German people, constitutes political unity…. The real bond is the common blood….

According to the National Socialist conception … it is not individual human beings, but races, peoples, and nations that constitute the elements of the divinely willed order of this world…. The individual human being can be conceived only as a member of a community of people to whom he is racially similar, from whom he inherits his physical and spiritual endowments…. National Socialism does not recognize a separate individual sphere which, apart from the community, is to be painstakingly protected from any interference from the state….

The Reich Citizenship Law actualizes the Volkish ordering of the German people on the political level….

[The law] elevates the bearer of German or racially kindred blood above the rest of the state’s subjects by according to him alone the right to assume full Reich citizenship. All persons of alien blood — hence, especially Jews — are automatically excluded from attaining Reich citizenship.

Source: George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; first published Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), pp. 327–332. © 1966 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

EVALUATE THE EVIDENCE