Terrible lawyers

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Book cover 1987

“Terrible Jurists” - subtitle: The unresolved past of our justice system - is the title of a book first published in 1987 by the lawyer Ingo Müller . It deals with the crimes of the German judiciary during the time of National Socialism and the legal processing of these crimes prevented by the assumption of Nazi lawyers in the civil service of the Federal Republic of Germany .

The book received widespread public attention and sparked an ongoing debate about the independence of judges and the obligation of the constitutional state to deal with past judicial crimes. The 7th revised new edition was last published in 2014.

term

Müller's book title took up an expression by the writer Rolf Hochhuth , which he referred to in 1978 in the course of the Filbinger affair with the behavior of the then Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg , Hans Filbinger , during his time as a naval judge . In the introduction, Müller recalled the dictum he had fallen in an interview on May 8, 1978 in the magazine Der Spiegel : What was right then cannot be wrong today. Müller saw this "insistence on the legality of the inhuman justice of the Third Reich" as symptomatic of the attitude of many German lawyers in the Nazi and West German post-war period. Accordingly, he described the continuities of a generation of judges who acted against fundamental principles of the rule of law, also on the basis of many individual biographies.

The expression "terrible lawyers" has become a household word since 1978, which is also transferred in books and media to the entanglements of other professional groups in the Nazi crimes, for example "terrible officials " for bureaucrats, "terrible teachers " for violent educators, " Terrible Doctors ”for partially convicted doctors who murdered concentration camp prisoners in human experiments in the Third Reich .

content

Müller published his book as a conscious reaction to the end or the never initiated criminal prosecution of judges of the People's Court in 1987. He began his work with the words: “Among the crimes of the Nazi regime, those of the German judiciary have remained largely unobserved and unpunished. It is an oppressive fact that the lawyers have succeeded in disguising and glossing over their past. "( Ingo Müller : Terrible Jurists)

In the first chapter he described in a few pages the struggle of the judiciary at the beginning of the 19th century for independence, which went hand in hand with the Enlightenment movement and the struggle for human rights against the reactionary politics of Prince von Metternich . The second chapter, entitled "The forced adaptation" describes how Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the Empire the judiciary for political advantage and laws state-controlled.

With the 3rd and 4th chapters, Müller approached his actual topic: He described the judges of the Weimar Republic , their relationship to the rise of National Socialism and German rearmament. In many individual cases, he showed how the Weimar judiciary covered and promoted these processes, also with new legal terms and legal constructions such as the “state emergency” or the “ measures of state emergency ”.

In the second main part (pp. 35–202), Müller described "The German Justice 1933 to 1945". It was based on the Reichstag fire process on the "self-alignment" of the German judges' association , described the role of Reich Court President Erwin Bumke and constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt in the creation of the Nazi state through exceptional laws since March 1933, the elimination of any political opposition through the still courts not dominated by Nazi judges and the displacement of Jews and liberal lawyers from the legal profession with the law on admission to the legal profession .

He then described the deformation of law caused by the National Socialist worldview and the cloaking of Nazi terror and Nazi crimes by introducing new legal terms such as “ leadership ”, “ ethnic order ”, “ racial equality ”, “protection of the national community ” and the like. a., the binding of the civil servants to the Führer instead of the law, the systematic tightening of the penal system through the establishment of concentration camps , the racist legal doctrine that led to the Nuremberg Laws and a flood of " racial disgrace " trials, the "total disenfranchisement" of the Jews through ever new discriminatory legal definitions and penal ordinances by lawyers, the legal release of the forced sterilization of "hereditary diseases" and the " destruction of life unworthy of life " in Action T4 , the role of the Reichsgericht , Volksgerichtshof and special courts , which he " tribunals of the inner front" named their role in the conquered areas of Eastern Europe, the night and fog justice of the kidnapping and internment of potential resistance fighters without a trace, the competitive situation between the courts and the Gestapo , the military courts in World War II. In the last chapter 18 of this main part, Müller also described individual cases of judicial resistance to the systematic perversion of the law in the Nazi state.

Effects

The book caused a sensation among the general public and earned the author great popularity outside of the legal press. On May 4, 1988 Müller received the biennial Carl von Ossietzky Prize for Contemporary History and Politics from the City of Oldenburg for this book - together with Karl Holl for its publication Pazifismus in Deutschland .

See also

literature

  • Ingo Müller: Terrible lawyers. Kindler-Verlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-463-40038-3 ; New edition Edition Tiamat , Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-89320-258-4 .
  • Karl Holl: Pacifism in Germany; Ingo Müller: Terrible Jurists: A Documentation on the Carl von Ossietzky Prize of the City of Oldenburg in 1988. Oldenburg Culture Department (ed.), Oldenburg 1988, ISBN 3-87358-315-1 .

Web links