LOS ANGELES — After resting 50 years in the vault of a small California library — its existence unknown even to Holocaust scholars — the original manuscript of Germany’s Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws went on display late last month at a Jewish museum in Los Angeles.
The Skirball Cultural Center announced last week that it has received on indefinite loan the four-page document, bearing Adolf Hitler’s cramped signature, which in 1935 deprived Germany’s Jews of all legal protection.
“It is like finding an original copy of the U.S. Constitution — but unfortunately a very evil one, signed by the man who instigated it. There’s a strange emotional power that comes with the original — some of the terror and horror is attached,” said Saul Friedlander, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and a child survivor of the Holocaust who has written about the early Nazi years.
The document was held in the Huntington Library in San Marino since June 11, 1945, when Gen. George Patton Jr. presented it to the library.
Patton, whose family home adjoined the Huntington estate, had a few weeks earlier given another present to the library — a deluxe, ceremonial copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” bound in white leather with bronze clasps, embossed with a gold swastika and weighing 35 pounds. The book, captured by Patton’s troops near the German town of Weimar and inscribed by the general, also disappeared into the Huntington Library’s vault.
During the next 50 years, Huntington presidents and librarians knew what was in the vault, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
The Huntington complex, consisting of the library, art collection and botanical gardens, is primarily devoted to British and American history and art. Its officials, who believed that Patton’s presents were not appropriate for display, apparently never thought of offering them to a more appropriate institution.
What triggered a change was the opening of the Skirball museum in 1996, when Rabbi Uri Herscher, its founder and president, invited Robert Skotheim, president of the Huntington Library, for a tour.
Despite their different backgrounds, the two men hit it off. Their friendship deepened after Herscher invited his colleague to a family seder.
In March, Herscher was invited to the Huntington to inspect Patton’s gifts.
First, Huntington librarian David Zeidberg presented Herscher with the copy of “Mein Kampf.”
“As soon as he handed me the book, I fumbled and dropped it,” Herscher recalled recently in an emotional interview. “I felt that I was holding a death warrant in my hands. Then I started crying. Then I went to the bathroom and for 10 minutes washed my hands over and over again.”
For Herscher, the document has personal meaning as well.
“It was the publication of the Nuremberg Laws that convinced my father and my mother, who had not met at that time, to separately leave Germany and emigrate to Palestine.”
The three parts of the Nuremberg Laws were hastily drafted at a police station over a two-day weekend for presentation and instant enforcement, at the massive Nazi “Party Rally of Freedom” on Sept. 15, 1935.
The first part, titled “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German blood.” This section contains the only handwritten change in the typed text, when someone crossed out the word “sexual” in strictures against “extramarital sexual intercourse.”
In the second part, those not of German blood were stripped of their citizenship, and the third part designated the swastika as the official German flag. Jews were forbidden to fly the national flag but permitted to display the “Jewish colors.”
The Nuremberg Laws and “Mein Kampf” are on display at the Skirball museum through Sept. 5. Following a renovation and expansion of museum galleries, the document will be on permanent exhibit starting in December.