allegations of Jewish blood (true or false) could be used for blackmail. Local officials, however, were already requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry. In 1934, Wilhelm Frick warned local officials about banning such marriages on their own, but in 1935, authorized them to delay applications by mixed couples. Even before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, the SS regularly arrested those accused of racial defilement and paraded them through the streets with placards around their necks detailing their crime. Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples. One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaved and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew." Placards were widely used to humiliate. Das Schwarze Korps, in its April 1935 issue, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in. It reported a story that a Jew had enticed a seventeen-year-old employee into nude midnight bathing—the girl being saved from suicide only by the intervention of an SS patrol, and a mob of thousands besieged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was the main person behind the persecution of those involved with accusations of Rassenschande. Nuremberg Laws In Nazi Germany, after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, sexual relations and marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans were prohibited. Although the laws at first were primarily against Jews, they were later extended to the Romani, Blacks, and their offspring. Persons accused of racial defilement were publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets with placards around their necks proclaiming their crime. Those convicted were sentenced to a period of time in a concentration camp. As the laws themselves did not permit the death penalty for those charged with racial defilement, the jurisdiction bypassed this and summoned special courts to allow the death penalty for such cases. The extent of the law meant that the police were insufficient to the task of detecting infractions; more than three-fifths of all Gestapo cases were prompted by denunciations. Germans who had intermarried with Jews and other non-Aryans prior to the Nuremberg Laws did not have their unions nullified, but were targeted and encouraged to divorce their existing partners. Rape of Jewish women during World War II was also forbidden, though it did little to stop the soldiers who often killed the