The first Yom Kippur under the Nazi regime passed quietly in Germany, but the Day of Atonement was marked by the issuance of several anti-Jewish laws and orders aimed chiefly to break up mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
Addressing the all-German Jurists convention now in session at Leipzig, Commissar of Justice Frank emphasized that racial purity must be considered the basic law for German justice.
In Prussia, the Minister of Justice, Hans Kerrl, ordered that all “Jews, negroes and other colored races must henceforth be prohibited from entering legal or civil intermarriages. Also already existing civil intermarriages shall be considered void.”
This order which is certain to cause innumerable tragedies and separations, is interpreted by today’s German press to mean that any Aryan may divorce his Jewish wife automatically, even though he is married not only civilly, but also through a church ceremony. The divorce claim can be based on the ground that the Aryan husband acknowledges the mistake of marrying a Jewess and now desires to keep the Aryan race clean.
In Berlin, the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, in connection with the celebration of his fiftieth birthday yesterday, proclaimed the wish that beginning with October 1, all German schools should teach racial science at least three hours, even at the expense of such subjects as mathematics and foreign languages, if no time for racial science is provided in the regular school schedule.
The Reichs Gesetzblatt yesterday published a decree of the government that non-Aryans cannot be patent registrators. The Ministries of Interior and Finance yesterday issued a joint order, acknowledging for the second time that in the future they will not employ any one of Jewish descent or who is married to a descendant of a Jew. Exception will be made only for the wives of those who fell in the war. Other special exceptions will be permitted only in urgent cases and only with the direct approval of the Minister himself.
The government also issued an order saying that all non-Aryans must be cleared out of all institutions not later than April 1, 1934.
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