UK
Imperial War Museum doubles down after criticism of wording in Nuremberg Race Law exhibit
The row centres on the inclusion of the word “observant” when describing who the Nazis deemed to be Jewish
August 13, 2025 10:07
The row centres on the inclusion of the word “observant” when describing who the Nazis deemed to be Jewish
August 13, 2025 10:07Eminent British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has joined criticism of the Imperial War Museum (IWM), after it doubled down on the wording of an information board about the Nuremberg Race Laws despite claims that it is inaccurate.
The exhibit, which is in the museum’s Holocaust Galleries, states: “Under the provision of the law, a person was defined as Jewish based on how many observant Jewish grandparents they had, even if they were not personally Jewish themselves.”
Passed in September 1935, the laws prohibited those considered Jewish by the state from holding citizenship within the Third Reich.
According to the text of the Reich Citizenship Law “a Jew is a person who is descended from at least three fully Jewish grandparents according to race”. The law also clarifies that “a grandparent is automatically considered fully Jewish if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community”.
However, according to respected Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, “the issue was not whether the grandparent was observant but whether his or her birth had been registered with the Jewish community”.
"The grandparent could later even have converted to Christianity but if the grandparent had been registered as Jewish at birth, that for the Nazis was the deciding factor,” he added.
Last week retired academic visiting from New York took issue with IWM’s inclusion of the word “observant”, and wrote to the museum, saying: “Wording referring to observant Jewish grandparents with its lack of historical accuracy must be changed.”
The woman, who has asked not to be named, told The Guardian she had been “extraordinarily impressed” with the museum’s display, but added: “Then I came to the race laws, and I know that ‘observant’ Jewish grandparents just made no sense. It disregards the vast majority of the Jewish population who are not observant.”
She added: “This is such a misleading impression of the Nazi outlook that for me it’s reprehensible that it stays in the public domain.”
According to The Guardian, the museum’s director general Caro Howell told the former academic that “full and sincere consideration” had been given to the points she had raised “but we stand by the curatorial choices that we have made and that our expert advisers have reviewed”.
Howell also reportedly said that the integrity of the IWM would be undermined if it made changes every time “questions of interpretative nuance” were raised.
Commenting on X, Montefiore said: “It may seem like a detail but it was a detail that cost many people their lives. It fails to understand Nazi race ideology. Not a ‘nuance’.
“The IWM should correct. Very odd [it] rejects criticism.”
The academic who raised the complaint also sought the advice of Browning and fellow Holocaust expert Timothy Snyder.
Snyder added: “It did not matter whether the grandparents were observant … No one was saved from persecution, as the wording incorrectly implies, by having grandparents who were not observant.
“As worded, the suggestion is that ‘bad Jews’, i.e. those with a secular (or even Reform) background, might have been spared from the persecutions that preceded the Holocaust, whereas ‘good Jews’, those with religious (or Orthodox) backgrounds, were the victims. This is nonsense.”
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