"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (128 page)

Source:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Notes to Pages xxix–3

Notes

Full reference information for the sources cited briefly here may be found in the bibliography.

Preface to the First German Edition

1.
See, for example, F. Siebert in his report “Hauptabteilung Innere Verwaltung der Regierung des Generalgouvernements,” November 11, 1959 (BA Ostdok. 13, General Government I b/5).

2.
Cf. guidelines for the editorial staff of the journal
Deutsches Recht (DR)
, the organ of the League of National Socialist German Jurists (in which above all proposals for reform affecting future legislation were discussed), according to which only contributions from Aryan persons were published and discussed, and “as a matter of course” only those authors were printed who stood “unequivocally behind the government of national revolution” (
DR
[1933]: 200).

Deutsche Justiz (DJ)
(before 1933
Preussisches Justizministerialblatt
), the official organ of the Reich Ministry of Justice, with numerous supplementary sections, was dedicated to the “guidance and enlightenment” of the judicial system; everything that was printed there appeared “on official orders and with official approval” and was “an important means … of promoting consensus on [the] goals of legislation” (Sauer,
Das Reichsjustizministerium
[1939], 24 f.). Publications in this journal were in the hands of the judicial press offices, under the central control of the Ministry of Justice (cf. A. Klütz, “Die Aufgaben der Justizpressestellen,”
DJ
[1933]: 405 ff.; secs. 6, 8, par. 3, of the administrative instructions of the minister of justice dated June 1, 1938, special edition of
Deutsche Justiz
, no. 17 [1938]: 23, reprinted in
DJ
[1938]: 546); for further details on the guiding role of
DJ
, see H. Hattenhauer in Federal Ministry of Justice, ed.,
Vom Reichsjustizamt zum Bundesministerium der Justiz
(1977), 1 ff., 78.

Another example that could be mentioned is
Juristische Wochenschrift (JW)
, the journal of the German Bar Association, which mainly published contributions on the law in force. From 1933 it appeared with the addition “in the League of National Socialist German Jurists.” The editor was Hans Frank, leader of the League of National Socialist German Jurists, and thus a strict National Socialist orientation was ensured. With issue 43 (October 28, 1933) the
JW
became the
Zeitschrift der Fachgruppe Rechtsanwälte im BNSDJ e. V.
(BNSDJ is the abbreviation for League of National Socialist German Jurists). On April 1, 1939,
JW
merged with
Deutsches Recht
, the organ of the NSRB (formerly the League of National Socialist German Jurists), becoming
Deutsches Recht vereint mit JW
. From 1941
Juristische Wochenschrift
disappeared completely from the official nomenclature.

3.
Cf. Fraenkel,
Der Doppelstaat
(1974), 15.

4.
For the purposes of this English translation, place names in the former Annexed Eastern Territories and the General Government are generally given in German with the Polish name supplied, at intervals throughout the text, in parentheses, except where standard English equivalents exist.

5.
For example, to designate all persons who were subject to racial persecution measures, the then current designations
nichtarisch
(non-Aryan) and
nichtdeutsch
(non-German) are used. These are combined in the designation
Fremdvölkische
(persons of foreign race or non-Germans), the main term used by the SS and police, which later became current in administrative and judicial circles.

6.
Literature appearing after that time is taken into account in the notes.

Introduction. I. The Tense Relations between State Leadership and State Administration

1.
Picker,
Hitlers Tischgespräche
(1951), 195.

2.
Table talk on the evening of March 29, 1942, quoted from ibid. (1968), 65 ff., which contains the familiar invective against the legal profession, particularly lawyers (
Advokaten
). There was a similar discussion at dinner on the evening of July 22, 1942 (ibid., 244).

3.
Conversation at table on the evening of March 29, 1942, quoted in ibid. (1951), 236.

4.
Conversation at table on the evening of June 24, 1942, quoted in ibid. (1968), 191.

5.
Cf. Jacoby,
Die Bürokratisierung der Welt
(1969), 210 ff., which draws on examples from Russian history and central bureaucracy; Bracher,
Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik
(1960), 174 ff.

6.
Loewenthal, “Totalitäre und demokratische Revolution” (1960–61), 29 ff.

7.
Bracher,
Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen
(1976), 41.

8.
Ibid.

Introduction. II. Law and Administration as Party Autonomous Powers

1.
Cf. the relevant chapters in Neumann,
Behemoth
(1963); and in Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
(1962).

2.
Mommsen,
Beamtentum im Dritten Reich
(1966); Matzerath,
Nationalsozialismus und kommunale Selbstverwaltung
(1970); Staff,
Justiz im Dritten Reich
(1978); Tessin,
Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei 1936–1945
(1957); Diehl-Thiele,
Partei und Staat im Dritten Reich
(1969); Broszat,
Der Staat Hitlers
(1971); Bollmus,
Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner
(1970); J. Klenner,
Verhältnis von Partei und Staat 1933–1945, dargestellt am Beispiel Bayerns
(1974); Echterhölter,
Das öffentliche Recht im Nationalsozialismus
(1970); Ostler,
Die deutschen Rechtsanwälte
(1971); Schorn,
Der Richter im Dritten Reich
(1959); Schorn,
Die Gesetzgebung des Nationalsozialismus als Mittel der Machtpolitik
(1963); Weinkauff and Wagner,
Die deutsche Justiz
(1968).

3.
The fact that many of those already active in the Nazi period also influenced judicial life in the Federal Republic, with all the personal culpability and deference to colleagues that implies; the mediocrity that passed for the Nazi weltanschauung, which was taken over virtually lock, stock, and barrel; and finally the concern that was felt about the unforeseeable consequences of a system whose advantages were initially so lauded by theoreticians and practitioners alike—all of this must have contributed to the failure of jurisprudence to address this question.

4.
Rüthers,
Die unbegrenzte Auslegung
(1973); Stolleis, “Gemeinschaft und Volksgemeinschaft” (1972), 16 ff.; Stolleis,
Gemeinwohlformeln im nationalsozialistischen Recht
(1974).

5.
Ramm, “Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitsrecht” (1968); F. K. Kaul,
Geschichte des Reichsgerichts
(1971); Kolbe,
Reichsgerichtspräsident Dr Erwin Bumke
(1975). For a critical appreciation of the development of the judicial system, see Kübler, “Der deutsche Richter und das demokratische Gesetz” (1963).

6.
Descriptive and reportorial works include Ostler,
Die deutschen Rechtsanwälte
(1971); H. Schorn,
Der Richter im Dritten Reich
; Schorn,
Die Gesetzgebung des Nationalsozialismus als Mittel der Machtpolitik
; Echterhölter,
Das öffentliche Recht im Nationalsozialismus
. Early apologetic studies were Weinkauff and Wagner,
Die deutsche Justiz
; Schorn,
Der Richter im Dritten Reich
. More recently, H. Kessler, “25 Jahre Bundesgerichtshof,”
Deutsche Richterzeitung
(1975): 294 ff., writes of the good judicial tradition of the Reich Supreme Court, which by and large also held up during the Nazi period; cf. also the essay by Martin, “Die Bundesanwaltschaft beim Bundesgerichtshof” (1975), in which the author draws on his six months as a scientific assistant at the Reich Attorney General’s Office to give his impressions of the Reich attorneys of the day (by no means an “assortment of committed Nazi lawyers”; no “protagonists of the Nazi ideology”; “notable reticence toward if not downright opposition to the party line”), without “wishing to play down the subsequent fateful entanglement of the Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court’s administration of justice, which undermined the traditional principles of judicial interpretation.”

7.
Cf. Weinkauff and Wagner,
Die deutsche Justiz
, with R. Schmid, “Je m’excuse,”
KJ
(1969): 102 ff.

8.
For the best analysis of the system of administration in the Reich, see Lassar, “Reichseigene Verwaltung unter der Weimarer Verfassung” (1926); Arndt,
Kommentar zum Reichsbeamtengesetz
(1923); H. Nawiasky, “Die Stellung des Berufsbeamtentums im parlamentarischen Staat,”
Recht und Staat
37 (1925).

9.
Cf. in particular the speech by R. Naumann at the Congress of German Constitutional Law Teachers on October 14–15, 1954,
VVdStRL
, no. 13 (1955): 88 ff., in which he comes to the conclusion that, in the legal sense, the permanent Civil Service had survived the crisis of 1945, though there was evidently historical and political discontinuity (118). The only contribution at the conference to support the thesis of the demise of the permanent civil service in 1945 was that of E. Friesenhahn (see
VVdStRL
, no. 13 [1955]).

10.
See Hitler’s comments on the cities’ arts policies in a conversation at table on the evening of May 3, 1942, quoted from Picker,
Hitlers Tischgespräche
(1951), 236: “Berlin’s central administration is confusing the responsibility of the central power, which should set the general line and only intervene when things go wrong, with that of unitarianism, which stifles all life around it. One should therefore endeavor to train as many effective administrators as possible in the country at large and use them to implement the powers of the ministerial bureaucracy.”

11.
Cf. Schmitt, who ascertained that the laws approved or decreed by Hitler were usually limited to general clauses that left all possible scope to the departmental legislative powers (“Der Zugang zum Machthaber,” in
Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze
[1958], 430 ff.).

12.
Medicus, “Das Reichsministerium des Innern—Geschichte und Aufbau” (1940).

13.
Cf. Fraenkel,
Der Doppelstaat
(1974), 101, with reference to the finding of Justice Brandeis: “The doctrine of the separation of powers was taken over in 1787 by the [Federal] Convention, not in order to increase efficiency but to prevent the exercise of arbitrary powers” (U.S. Supreme Court,
Meyers v. United States
272 US 52, 293).

14.
Cf. BVerfGE 6, 133 (162).

15.
See secs. 1, 3, par. 1, of the German Civil Service Code dated January 26, 1937 (
RGBl
. I 39), according to which a civil servant had a “duty of service and loyalty” to the “Führer and Reich,” having to remain “loyal to the Führer beyond the grave.” Cf. Schmitt, “Der Zugang zum Machthaber,” in
Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze
, 430 ff.; Diehl-Thiele,
Partei und Staat im Dritten Reich
, 24. He asserted that the “problem of access to the Führer was less—or not only—an organizational expression of power being concentrated in Hitler’s hands” than a result of the fact that the ultimate
power of decision
resided with him and him alone, but that analysis can be applied only to major political decisions, since the above-cited executive powers of the administration left considerable scope for decision making.

16.
The discussion about the administration of justice in Boberach, ed.,
Richterbriefe
(1975), contains much instructive material.

17.
Rüthers,
Die unbegrenzte Auslegung
, 111 ff., 133 ff.

18.
The “concrete philosophy of order” (C. Schmitt,
Über die drei Arten rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens
[1934]) was the contemporary expression of the so-called institutional approach to the law, whose basis is to formulate the consititution of a political system only in its statutory law [denying natural law or ethical principles]. Though it was not possible before 1933 to put the value system of the Weimar Republic into practice in the framework of statutory law, because there was too much resistance to the fundamental democratic-republican decisions (for evidence of that, see Kirn,
Verfassungsumsturz oder Rechtskontinuität
[1972], 67 n. 190), this “philosophy” of law became the leading thinking after 1933, with the effect that the positions of power inherited or usurped by the Nazis were transferred into statutory law, legitimated, and resolutely defended (66 f.).