Law For The Restoration Of The Professional Civil Service
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (German: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, shortened to Berufsbeamtengesetz), also known as Civil Service Law, Civil Service Restoration Act, and Law to Re-establish the Civil Service, was a law passed by the National Socialist regime on April 7, 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler attained power.
This law re-established a "national" civil service and allowed tenured civil servants to be dismissed. Further, civil servants who were not of "Aryan descent" as well as opponents of the Nazi regime ("Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national state") were forced to retire from the civil service. This meant that Jews 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:
- World War I veterans who had served at the front
- those who had been in the civil service continuously since 1 August 1914 (i.e. since the start of the War)
- 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 April 7, 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.
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