Summary
Title: Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich
Author: Ingo Muller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674404181
Pro:
• Wealth of information from original sources
• Disturubing but compelling arguments about role of the judiciary in mass murder
Con:
• None
Description:
• Analysis of the role of judges, lawyers, and law professors in the Nazi regime
• Explains how the judicial system accommodated the needs of the Nazis
• Shows how little changed after WW II, and how the criminals got away with their acts
Book Review
The laws and legal policies of the Third Reich didn’t appear out of nowhere, they almost all had strong precedents in the statues of the Weimar Republic and earlier. Many even had close analogues in other nations, like America (for example, the shameful sterilization laws). This does not mean, however, that there is a straight and inevitable line leading to the injustices under the Nazis — the connection makes the developments more understandable, but not excusable or justified.
How and why these developments occurred — and, more importantly, what sorts of awful precedents, polices, and injustices the jurists in Nazi Germany created — are all recounted in terrible detail by Ingo Muller in Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. Muller’s basic thesis is simple: lawyers, judges, law professors, and others involved in the criminal justice system were not innocent victims co-opted by a criminal regime; instead, they are morally and intellectually responsible for being willing participants in mass murder, terror, and the creation of a dictatorial state. They helped make the Third Reich possible because they were willing to set aside the principles of justice, fairness, and law which should have hindered the Nazi agenda.
Perhaps the best statement of this comes not from Muller’s book, but from a work of fiction: the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg. At the end of the film, the following exchange takes place between the chief defendant and the presiding judge:
- Ernst Janning: Judge Haywood... the reason I asked you to come. Those people, those millions of people... I never knew it would come to that. YOU must believe it, YOU MUST believe it.
Judge Dan Haywood: Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
As Haywood walks away, it appears that Janning’s world — what little of his self-respect he had managed to preserve — starts to come crashing down as he realizes the horrible truth in Haywood’s words. Janning is responsible not because he personally sent millions to die or because he always intended for millions to die, but because he deliberately engaged the process by violating the principles of law which were needed to keep millions from dying. Nearly every judge and and law professor in Germany at the time, to one degree or another, was likely guilty in a similar sense.
German legal traditions and policies are different from those in America, something which can make it difficult to understand what went on under the Nazis. Fortunately, translator Deborah Lucas Schneider writes an introduction which explains all of this. She also includes side notes through the text to help readers unfamiliar with some of the concept and history that could be taken for granted among educated German readers of the original text.
Although the original was written with a more experienced and informed audience in mind, the translation reads very well and should be accessible to most readers with an interest either in law generally or in Nazi Germany specifically. In recounting how law and courts were perverted to serve the horrors of the Third Reich, this is one of the most important books that one can read on the Nazis.
