Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service

• 1. Introduction

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  The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service arrived in Germany on the 7th of April 1933, just two months after Adolf Hitler had come to power. Within weeks, teachers lost their classrooms, judges were stripped of their benches, and professors were turned away from their universities. The law did not announce itself as a persecution. It called itself a restoration. That word choice tells you almost everything about the world it was building.

  What made this law different from the chaos of street violence that had preceded it was its bureaucratic precision. It worked through forms, through ordinances, through definitions of ancestry reaching back to grandparents. It asked civil servants across the Reich, the Länder, and the municipalities to prove, in writing, that they were of Aryan descent. Those who could not, or would not, faced forced retirement or outright dismissal.

  Albert Einstein was among the first to understand what was coming. He resigned his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and emigrated to the United States before the law could expel him. But Einstein's famous departure was the exception. For most of the people this law targeted, there was nowhere obvious to go, and no world-famous name to ease the passage out.

• 2. A Law Called Restoration

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  Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick drafted the original bill with a sweeping scope. Every civil servant of non-Aryan descent, at every level of German government, was to be dismissed immediately. The word "restoration" in the title was not accidental. The law framed the expulsion of Jewish and politically unreliable officials as a return to a natural order, not a departure from it.

  President Paul von Hindenburg was not prepared to accept the law as Frick had written it. Hindenburg objected until three categories of civil servants were specifically protected: those who had served at the front in the First World War, those who had been in continuous civil service since the 1st of August 1914, and those who had lost a father or a son in combat during that war. Hitler agreed to these amendments and signed the bill into law on the 7th of April 1933.

  In practice, those exceptions protected a significant portion of Jewish civil servants, because many had served in the war. But the exceptions also revealed the law's logic: military service to the German state could temporarily outweigh Jewish ancestry. After Hindenburg died in 1934, that logic was swept aside entirely by the Nuremberg Laws, and Jewish civil servants still holding their posts were given notice by the 31st of December 1935 at the latest.

• 3. Defining the Undefinable

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  The law required a definition of who was Aryan and who was not, and producing that definition turned out to be harder than its authors anticipated. Albert Gorter attempted the first official redefinition, describing Aryans as one branch of the Caucasian race, subdivided into western and eastern groups. His definition stretched to include Slavs, Greeks, Celts, Albanians, Hindus, Persians, Afghans, Armenians, and Georgians. It also excluded Jews and Arabs as members of the Semitic branch, and Berbers as members of the Hamitic branch.

  But this definition created immediate problems because it included non-European peoples that the law's architects did not intend to protect. Achim Gercke stepped in with a revised formulation, drawn from the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy. His version defined an Aryan as someone tribally related to German blood, specifically a descendant of peoples who had been settled in Europe in closed tribal communities since recorded history.

  Even after Gercke's revision, the law's First Ordinance, issued on the 11th of April 1933, took a different approach entirely. Under that ordinance, "non-Aryan" was defined not by ethnic origin but by parentage: a person was considered non-Aryan if one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish religion. By the 1st of September 1933, Frick issued a second supplementary decree clarifying that religion alone was not the deciding factor. Descent, race, and blood were what mattered, and non-Aryan status could be established even when no parent or grandparent had belonged to the Jewish faith.

• 4. Article 4 and Political Enemies

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  Article 4 of the law addressed a separate category of person entirely: civil servants who, because of their previous political activities, could not guarantee they would always support the national state without reservation. This clause targeted political opponents of National Socialism, specifically members of the Communist Party and affiliated organizations, who were to be dismissed outright.

  The phrase used in Nazi propaganda for those caught by the law's provisions about post-1918 hires was "membership book officials," or Parteibuch-Beamte. These were people who had entered the civil service after 1918 and could not demonstrate that they had acquired the full training their positions required. The implication was that they had obtained their posts through political connections rather than professional merit.

  Under the law's Section 6, civil servants could also be forced into retirement without any stated cause, simply "for the simplification of administration." Positions vacated this way were not to be refilled. The pensions of those pushed out were not uniformly protected, and in 1938 the Seventh Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law reduced the guaranteed old-age pension for those groups affected by the original 1933 dismissals.

• 5. The Reach Beyond Government

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  The civil service law was only the beginning of a cascade. Shortly after the main law passed, a parallel measure extended its prohibitions to lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries. Then on the 25th of April 1933, the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities imposed restrictions on Jewish enrollment in educational institutions.

  The 21st of January 1935 brought another ordinance specifically targeting higher education: the Law on the Retirement and Transfer of Professors as a Result of the Reorganization of the German System of Higher Education. Between the original 1933 law and this 1935 measure, German universities lost a generation of faculty.

  The law that took the Ariernachweis, the formal proof of Aryan ancestry, as its central instrument also built a system of enforcement. Every person remaining in the civil service was required to produce documentary evidence of their lineage. That administrative requirement turned ancestry into a matter of state record, and the records created would outlast the individuals who filed them.

• 6. A Turning Point for German Jewry

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  The 7th of April 1933 marked the first time an anti-Semitic law had been enacted in Germany since the emancipation of German Jews in 1871. That emancipation had granted full civil and political equality; the 1933 law reversed that status at a single stroke for every Jew employed by the state.

  The Frontkämpferprivileg, the front-fighter privilege that Hindenburg had insisted upon, offered a temporary shelter that quickly eroded. Once Hindenburg died in 1934, the amendments he had demanded lost their force. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws closed the loopholes entirely, and those Jewish civil servants who had survived in their posts through 1934 received their final notices by the end of 1935.

  Rapidly, in close succession, the regime issued numerous implementing regulations that expanded the law's reach across the Reichsbank and other institutions beyond the traditional civil service. The pension protections that some dismissed employees had counted on were narrowed in 1938 by the Seventh Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, stripping away even that partial security from people who had already lost their livelihoods.