These moves prompted a protest from Captain Leo Löwenstein, the president of the Reich Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers, who wrote to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to complain.
He wrote: After the blood sacrifices and services made to the homeland, we firmly believe that the German Jews are entitled to equal rights as citizens.
[1]It also met with the disapproval of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, a former First World War Field Marshal, who wrote in a letter to Hitler: In recent days, a number of cases have been reported to me in which judges, lawyers and court officials wounded in the war, with unblemished records, have been forced to retire and later have been discharged because they are of Jewish descent.
The law of 7 April 1933 thus included a clause that exempted such people, creating the so-called Frontkämpferprivileg (front-line fighter privilege).
[3] However, the privilege was abolished after Hindenburg's death when the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 instituted systematic discrimination against Jews and deprived them of citizenship.