Anti-Jewish Laws in Germany It does not take long to
pass laws in Germany. The swiftness with which legislation wholly pleasing to the • Left •wing of the Nazi party was carried through a hastily -summoned Reichstag made it possible for law-making to be an exciting episode in a Nazi rally. Henceforward the swastika flag, emblem of the National Socialist movement, becomes the sole official flag of the German Reich. A second law and a third impose further legal disabilities on the Jews. The ban on mixed marriages and illicit relations between Jews and Aryan Germans merely gives legal sanction to a prohibition which has long been enforced either • by rulings in the courts or decrees issued by Nazi leaders, to say nothing of lawless methods of forcible persuasion. But the exclusion of the Jews, and along with them persons who have incurred the dis- pleasure of the authorities, from full German citizenship is a more serious matter. Henceforward not political rights only but social rights essential to participation in German intellectual or cultural life are denied them in legal theory as well as practice. A class of persons, with inferior rights, consisting primarily of Jews, but to which others may be degraded, now receives its legal definition.
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