Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
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The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (in German: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums or short: Berufsbeamtengesetz), also known as Civil Service Law, Civil Service Restoration Act, and Law to Re-establish the Civil Service, was a law passed by the National Socialist regime on April 7, 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler attained power.
This law re-established a "national" civil service and allowed tenured civil servants to be dismissed. Further, civil servants who were not of "Aryan descent"[1] to as well as opponents of the Nazi regime ("Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national State") were forced to retire from the civil service. This meant that Jews and political opponents could not serve as teachers, professors, judges, or other government positions. Shortly after, a similar law was passed concerning lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, and notaries.
As the law was first drafted by the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, all those of "non-Aryan descent" were to be fired immediately at the Reich, Lander and municipal levels of government. However, the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg objected to the bill until it had amended to exclude three classes of civil servants from the ban:
- World War I veterans who had served at the front
- those who had been in the civil service continuously since 1 August 1914 (i.e. since the start of the war)
- those who lost a father or son in combat in the war[2]
Hitler agreed to these amendments and the bill was signed into law on April 7, 1933.[3] In practice, the amendments excluded most Jewish civil servants[citation needed] and not until after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, were the amendments disallowed. Nonetheless, the passage of the “Law for a Restoration of a Professional Civil Service” in 1933 was a crucial turning point in the history of German Jewry for this law marked the first time since the last of the German Jews had been emancipated in 1871 that an anti-Semitic law had been passed in Germany.
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[edit] Related Ordinances
- 11 April 1933 – First Ordinance on the Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service[4]
- 6 May 1933 – Third Ordinance on the Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service[6]
- 21 January 1935 – Law on the Retirement and Transfer of Professors as a Result of the Reorganization of the German System of Higher Education[7]
[edit] See also
- Ahnentafel, Ahnenpass to proof the non-Jewish descent
- Racial policy of Nazi Germany
[edit] References
- Bauer, Yehuda: A History Of The Holocaust. New York: F. Watts, 1982. ISBN 0-531-09862-1.
- Friedländer, Saul: Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1. The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997 ISBN 0-06-019042-6.
- Hentschel, Klaus, editor and Ann M. Hentschel, editorial assistant and Translator: Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Birkhäuser: Basel, Berlin, Boston, 1996. ISBN 0-8176-5312-0.
[edit] External links
- Robertson, Struan. "The Jewish Community in Hamburg 1860-1943". Retrieved September 25, 2005.
- Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933 in English
- German original of the text
- Berufsbeamtengesetz from German-language Wikipedia. Retrieved September 25, 2005.
[edit] Notes
- ^ The term "non-Aryan" was a common circumlocution and euphemism for "Jew" during the first two years of the Third Reich. While the term "non-Aryan" on its face could be interpreted, by the unwary, as extending to persons other than Jews, the regulations implementing the term (and the officials enforcing the regulations) focused on the Jewishness of a person's ancestors, and not on their "Aryan-ness" or "non-Aryan-ness" (which was largely a meaningless concept in any case). See discussion in Mischling Test article on the supplementary regulations for the law, which implemented the "one Jewish grandparent" (i.e. so-called "quarter-Jew") rule. Of course, these early Third Reich regulations were superseded by the Nuremberg Laws and their own supplementary decrees and implementing regulations, which set up considerably more intricate tests for determining who was, and was not, "Jewish."
- ^ See Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service for the exceptions.
- ^ Under the Enabling Act of 1933, neither the consent of the Reichstag nor the signature of the President of the Republic was any longer required for the promulgation of law. The amelioration of Hindenburg was thus a matter of political expediency, not of legal necessity.
- ^ Hentschel, 1996, 25-26. Document #8.
- ^ Hentschel, 1996, 34-36. Document #12.
- ^ Hentschel, 1996, 46-49. Document #17.
- ^ Hentschel, 1996, 96-97. Document #36.
