The Nuremberg Laws signed by Adolf Hitler that set the legal groundwork for the Holocaust will be transferred from California’s Huntington Museum to the Washington-based National Archives, the institutions said.
The typewritten pages bearing Hitler’s signature and dated September 15, 1935 were whisked out of Germany after World War II by US General George Patton, who donated them to the Huntington Museum, in San Marino, near Los Angeles, in 1945.
“The National Archives is the appropriate permanent home for this material,” Huntington Museum president Steven Koblik said in a statement.
“The Archives is the repository for an abundance of US Army records from World War II, including those related to war crimes. These documents comprise an extremely important part of that narrative,” he added.
“We are very grateful that the Huntington Library is now providing these historically important documents to the National Archives, where they will join other original documents relating to horrors of the Third Reich,” US Archivist David Ferriero said in turn.
The only copies of the Nuremberg Laws believed to exist in the US were loaned by the Huntington to the Skirball Cultural Centre, an educational institution on Jewish heritage, where they were exhibited from 1999-2009.
The documents were drawn up by the Nazis to provide the legal underpinnings for persecuting the Jews up to their near extermination in death camps during what became known as the Holocaust, which killed an estimated six million Jews in Europe.
Divided into three areas, one of the Nuremberg Laws titled Law for the Safeguard of German Blood and German Honour, prohibited marriage, cohabitation or sexual relations between Germans and Jews. Jews were also banned from hiring Germans as domestic help and raising the flag of the Third Reich in their homes.