On the Anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws

Two people’s stories show how Nazi legislation stripped Jews of their rights and divided families.

The “Nuremberg Laws,” which were named after the city where the Nazi Party held its 7th Party Congress, were announced 91 years ago, on September 15, 1935. They represented one more step in the systematic dehumanization of Jewish Germans and their families and provided official legal grounds for the subsequent persecution and extermination of Jews. The aim of the legislation was to strictly separate Jewish and non-Jewish life at every level of society. After lengthy debate, a decree was issued on November 14, 1935, giving the exact definition of who was considered Jewish, who was considered German, and who was classified as a “person of mixed Jewish blood” in Nazi terminology. The Nazis proceeded to tear thousands of marriages apart and separate children from their parents and grandparents. The lives of Cordelia Hoffmann and Rudolf Hensgen illustrate the personal consequences.

Estranged from her own family: Cordelia Hoffmann

Cordelia, who was born in Munich on January 1, 1929, was the illegitimate daughter of writer and teacher Elisabeth Langgässer. Her mother had been baptized into the Catholic faith, but had Jewish roots. Her biological father, legal scholar Hermann Heller, was Jewish. Like her mother, Cordelia was baptized a Catholic as a baby. Since her mother worked, she spent most of her early childhood being looked after by her grandmother in Berlin. In 1935, the year the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, her mother married philosopher Wilhelm Hoffmann, who was not Jewish.

The couple moved to Berlin, and Cordelia lived with them from then on. The Nazis classified her mother’s marriage as a “privileged mixed marriage,” but in the eyes of the Nazis, Cordelia herself was Jewish. “I was a good Catholic German; I knew nothing about Judaism; I didn’t feel like a Jew,” she later recalled in an interview.

Following the November pogroms, the Nazis issued a decree on November 15, 1938, banning Jewish children from attending public schools. Cordelia had to leave her high school and attend a Jewish school. Beginning in 1941, Cordelia was forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge. Known as the “Jewish star,” this mandatory and deliberately discriminatory mark of identification made her feel like an outsider in her own family, since her three half-sisters were not required to wear one. Afraid of putting her parents and half-siblings in danger, she agreed to leave the country. But she could not obtain the documents she needed in order to emigrate, so instead of leaving the country, she went into hiding at various addresses in Berlin. In 1943, Cordelia’s mother arranged for her to be adopted by a Spanish-Belgian couple. It was hoped that Spanish citizenship would protect her from deportation. But things did not work out as planned.

Deportation to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz

Cordelia was 14 years old when she and her mother were summoned by the Gestapo. They forced her to keep her German passport by threatening that her mother would be charged with high treason if she refused. The girl signed the papers and, in doing so, sealed her own fate: deportation. The Gestapo took her to an assembly camp on Iranische Straße in the Gesundbrunnen neighborhood of Berlin. In March 1944, she was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, and eight weeks later to Auschwitz. She reportedly worked in a light bulb factory at first and later as a typist.

As the Red Army advanced, the SS liquidated Auschwitz concentration camp and forced all those prisoners who were able to walk to march west. Cordelia survived the death march. Eventually, she was rescued by the Swedish Red Cross and taken to Sweden on one of the “White Buses.”

In Sweden, she met her husband, had children, and went on to become a successful journalist. As far as she was concerned, returning to Germany was out of the question. Instead, she began living according to the rules of Judaism for the first time in her life. In 1974, she emigrated to Israel. “I wanted to live the lives of all the people I saw being sent to the gas chambers,” she said in a television interview, following the publication of her autobiographical novel “Burned Child Seeks the Fire.” In 2006, she returned to Sweden, where she died in 2012 at the age of 83.

A long struggle for his own German identity: Rudolf Hensgen

Rudolf Hensgen was born around 1900 in Vienna, the son of German businessman Julius Hensgen and his Jewish wife, Mathilde. He graduated from high school in Leipzig in 1923 and went on to study law in Berlin. When he graduated from university, he began a traineeship at Leipzig District Court.

It was impossible for him to complete his legal training – in 1933, he was dismissed from his position under the Nazi government’s “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which barred people of Jewish descent from joining the civil service. According to Nazi terminology, he was a “person of mixed Jewish blood,” even though his mother, Mathilde, had converted to Christianity before he was born. Despite being persecuted by the Nazi regime, Rudolf refused to let himself be alienated from his German identity.

Banned from exercising his profession for being “non-Aryan”

Rudolf was politically active and a member of the Center Party. He refused to accept the ban on practicing his profession and the exclusion of Jewish people from public life. With his wife Frieda, whom he married in 1933, he moved back to his hometown, Vienna, where he joined the Harand Movement, a conservative initiative that opposed racial hatred and antisemitism. Led by Austrian Catholic Irene Harand, the “World Movement Against Racial Hatred and Human Suffering” aimed to debunk antisemitic myths through public education.

In 1935, when the Nazi government enacted the Nuremberg Laws, Rudolf was probably still in Vienna. It is not known how he and his wife made a living during this period. By 1936, he was back in Germany.

Rudolf’s daughter Ruth was born in the late 1930s, in Apolda, near Weimar. A year later, he was picked up by the Gestapo in Weimar and held for three months. The reason for his detention is unclear. After his release, he found work as a bookkeeper. Early in the 1940s, his second daughter, Ingrid, was born, and Rudolf was drafted into the Wehrmacht. It seems likely that he had managed to conceal his ancestry – for him, this was a source of hope. Because of his Jewish mother, Rudolf was classified by the Nazis as a “person of mixed Jewish blood (first degree)” under the Nuremberg Laws and should not have been allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht.

Forced Labor and liberation

In February 1943, it became known that his mother was Jewish. Forced to leave the army, he found work as a lathe operator in Apolda. The persecution of people in “mixed marriages” and “persons of mixed Jewish blood” intensified, increasing the pressure they were under. In the fall, the Nazis decided that “persons of mixed Jewish blood (first degree)” would have to perform forced labor too. Starting in the fall of 1944, Rudolf had to work in Halle, Mechtenstedt, and Weißenfels.

His days as a forced laborer came to an end in the last days of the war, when he was liberated by the Americans. After the war, the military government allowed him to continue his legal training at the local court in Grimma. He was appointed a judge at the local court shortly afterwards and began to get involved in local politics. A founding member and chairman of the CDU in Grimma, his political activities and his bourgeois-conservative views soon brought him into conflict with the Soviet occupying forces. He was forcibly transferred to Leipzig to serve as a criminal court judge. In 1950, he was imprisoned on the orders of the SED and dismissed from public service for an alleged judicial error.

Following his dismissal, he fled to West Berlin with his family and wrote a letter to the East German Ministry of Justice: “Now that the Minister has admitted to criminally interfering in the case brought against me, it can no longer be called a trial, but must be recognized for what it is: a judicial farce.” In December 1950, the outspoken lawyer moved to Mainz and applied for emigration support. This was not because he no longer felt at home in Germany, but because “I fear developments that could bring back some of the things we suffered under,” as he wrote in his application to the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

The difficult path forward

The International Refugee Organization (IRO) did not automatically provide support to victims of persecution like Rudolf. They had to provide evidence of their persecution, especially if they were German and had lived in Germany all the time. Ironically, the fact that the Nazis had officially classified him as a “person of mixed Jewish blood” was helpful to him in this context. However, he continued to feel German and ultimately decided to stay in West Germany. In 1957, he got a job as a government employee. From 1960 until his death in 1975, he worked as a lawyer in Mainz.

The documents held by the Arolsen Archives

Rudolf Hensgen and Cordelia Edvardson, née Hoffmann, are just two of the thousands of people whose stories show how the Nuremberg Laws affected people’s lives. Many of these stories can be reconstructed with the help of documents held by the Arolsen Archives. Most of the documents are freely accessible in the online archive. Anyone who is looking for relatives or researching the stories of individual victims of persecution can use the online archive for their own research.