Introduction -- Legal refugees from Nazi Germany and the idea of liberty -- Redefining the rule of law, jurisprudence and the totalitarian state -- The long legal tradition and the European heritage in Nazi Germany -- Reconfiguring European legal tradition after the war -- The European narrative and the tradition of rights -- Conclusions
Summary:
"Introduction In a letter to Max Radin on April 2, 1933, Hermann Kantorowicz writes how the situation in Germany took a turn for the worse after the Nazis took power: What is happening there is even more terrible than American newspapers report and if our Nazis proclaim these reports a justification for their "reprisals", this is a mere pretext. Everything now going on is according to the Nazi party programme of February 25, 1920, especially to article 4, only no one believed such barbarism possible, myself excepted as you probably remember. The letters now written by thousands of German Jews denying every atrocity are, of course, written under the threat of still worse treatment. My own family has been severely stricken. Dozens of my cousins, in great part well-known lawyers and doctors, have lost their jobs and every means of subsistence, my brother, Professor in Bonn, is hiding I don't know where; his daughter, a girl of 21 years, has been imprisoned as a hostage; the Nazi-police tried to compel my mother, 74 years old, to give away the address of my brother; my late wife's cousin, the director of a theatre in Silesia, has been kidnapped by a Nazi auto during a rehearsal, conducted out of town, stripped naked, beaten and then forced to walk home in this state. One of my best friends in Kiel,the lawyer Spiegel, has been murdered and of course I myself cannot venture to show myself again in the present Germany (...)1 As this example shows, the Nazi revolution upended many of the things considered self-evident in Europe at the time: it appeared that the ideals of humanity, equality, rights and security were abandoned. Compounding the sense of crisis was the notion that truth and falsehood had lost their meanings, becoming dependent on the vagaries of the powers that be. A mere decade and a half after the carnage of the First World War had ended, a new barbarism had risen in Germany, the land that had previously been considered the centre of European civilization. The Nazi repression was a direct attack on the European tradition of justice and the rule of law. A jurist like Kantorowicz felt this acutely because among the main targets of Nazi repression after the takeover of power were the forces of law and order, meaning the police, the judiciary and lawyers, in order to bring down the German Rechtstaat"-- Provided by publisher.
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