Article 1 of the Law claimed that in order to re-establish a "national" and "professional" civil service, members of certain groups of tenured civil servants were to be dismissed. Civil servants who were not of Aryan descent were to retire. Non-Aryans were defined as someone descended from non-Aryans, especially those descended from Jewish parents, or grandparents. Members of the Communist Party, or any related or associated organisation were to be dismissed. This meant that Jews, other non Aryans, and political opponents could not serve as teachers, professors, judges, or other government positions. Shortly afterward, a similar law was passed concerning lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries. As the law was first drafted by the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, all those of "non-Aryan descent" were to be fired immediately at the Reich, Länder and municipal levels of government. However, the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg objected to the bill until it had been amended to exclude three classes of civil servants from the ban:
those who lost a father or son in combat in the Great War
Hitler agreed to these amendments and the bill was signed into law on 7 April 1933. In practice, the amendments excluded most Jewish civil servants and not until after Hindenburg's death in 1934, were they disallowed. Nonetheless, passage of the Berufsbeamtengesetz was a crucial turning point in the history of German Jewry for it marked the first time since the last German Jews had been emancipated in 1871 that an anti-Semitic law had been passed in Germany. In one particularly notable example of the law's effect, Albert Einstein resigned his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and emigrated to the United States before he could be expelled.
Content
Following the decree, Albert Gorter redefined the term 'Aryan' in the Aryan paragraph as: However, this definition was unacceptable because it included non-European races. Achim Gercke later redefined this unacceptable definition as the one already used by the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy which stated "An Aryan is one who is tribally related to German blood. An Aryan is the descendant of a Volk domiciled in Europe in a closed tribal settlement since recorded history." This new definition allowed the Civil Service Law to differentiate between 'Aryans' and 'non-Aryans'. However, the quantity of how much Jewish blood an individual was allowed to have until it was considered to damage the German Volk remained untenable.
Political opponents of national socialism should either be forced into retirement or let go from their jobs. Moreover, civil servants should be let go if they had started their jobs after 1918 and were now unable to demonstrate that they had acquired all the training necessary for their careers. These people were called "membership book officials " in the language of National Socialist propaganda. According to § 3 of the "First Ordinace for the accomplishment of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, the first definition of a Jew was defined as: They could be let go or prematurely forced into retirement. According to § 3, however, "non-Aryan" officials should be left in their positions if they had occupied those positions since a date before August 1914. Those Jewish civil servants who had a son or father who had been killed in the First World War were also spared from being sacked. This loophole also applied to "Frontkämpfer" . All persons in the civil service would have to be able to produce the Ariernachweis in order to prove that they had no ancestors of the Jewish faith. The loophole was closed by the Nuremberg Laws. Jewish civil servants still holding their posts were given notice by 31 December 1935 at the latest. According to § 6 of the law, civil servants could be forced into retirement without cause "for the simplification of administration". The vacant positions created by this action were not to be refilled. In rapid succession numerous regulations were dispensed with, as well as many employees and laborers in civil service as well as in the Reichsbank. Pensions were not allowed for all groups of people forced into the ranks of pensioners by this law. The guaranteed old-age pension was reduced in 1938 by the "Siebente Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz". On 1 September 1933, Frick issued the second supplementary decree of the law in attempt to define the terms “Aryan” and “non-Aryan”:
Related ordinances
11 April 1933 - First Ordinance on the Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
25 April 1933 - Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities
6 May 1933 - Third Ordinance on the Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
21 January 1935 - Law on the Retirement and Transfer of Professors as a Result of the Reorganization of the German System of Higher Education
