The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, broke its longstanding no-loans policy June 29 to provide the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles with four seldom-seen pages of Nazi typescripts from 1935 that prohibited Jews and Germans from intermarrying or cohabiting and limited citizenship to persons “of German or German-related blood.” The documents represent a crucial, chilling first step in Nazi racial laws that ultimately led to the Holocaust.
Known as the Nuremberg Laws and signed by Adolf Hitler, the documents have been at the Huntington since 1945 when General George S. Patton Jr. donated them after his soldiers found them in a Bavarian vault. Along with a unique ceremonial edition of Mein Kampf also recovered by Patton, the papers will be on permanent loan to the Skirball, an educational center for Jewish-American history founded in 1996.
“Like my predecessors I looked at them and I thought, ‘That’s interesting,’” Huntington Director David Zeidberg told the June 26 Washington Post. “But it still didn’t give them an appropriate context at the Huntington,” which primarily collects English and American history and literature. Their existence remained unknown to Holocaust researchers until March when Skirball scholars were invited to view them.
Posted July 5, 1999.