On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag, meeting at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, passed two laws. The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to people of German or related blood and reduced Jews to state subjects without political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and German citizens, and barred Jewish households from employing German women of childbearing age. The same day the swastika flag was made the national flag of Germany.
The laws were drafted in a hurry. Hitler had called the Reichstag into special session at the rally and wanted something to announce, and the text was written in the days before by officials including Wilhelm Frick and Hans Globke. Before this, persecution had been carried out through the one-party state and street violence, through the boycott of April 1933, the civil service law of the same month and the many local and professional decrees that pushed Jews out of employment. They added a definition. Bureaucracies run on definitions.
The definition was not in the September text. That came with the supplementary decree of November 14, 1935, which set out precisely who was to be treated as Jewish: someone with three or four Jewish grandparents, or someone with two Jewish grandparents who was married to a Jew or belonged to the Jewish community. People with one or two Jewish grandparents became Mischlinge, of mixed blood, and were treated differently again. The state then built the machinery of certificates, ancestry records and genealogical proof.
The consequences were immediate. Marriages were annulled. Sexual relations became a criminal offence carrying prison or, later, death. The remaining Jewish businesses were pushed toward liquidation, and the loss of citizenship meant no passports and no consular protection. Emigration rose sharply through 1936 and 1937, but the receiving countries' quotas were full and the regime taxed emigrants heavily on the way out.
The Nuremberg Laws are the point at which the persecution of Jews in Germany stopped being a campaign and became law. The framework they set out, the racial definition, the loss of rights by degrees and the bureaucracy that administered it, is the apparatus that carried the deportations and the camps. Hans Globke, who helped write them, later became head of the chancellery under Konrad Adenauer.