Hermann Raschhofer

Hermann Raschhofer (born July 26, 1905 in Ried ; † August 27, 1979 in Salzburg ) was a lawyer and international law teacher who worked in Germany .

Life

After graduating from high school at the age of 17 in Austria, Raschhofer studied law and political science in Marburg / Lahn with Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt (sociologist; 1883–1969) at the “Institute for Border and German Abroad”, then in Vienna and Innsbruck . During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students Innsbruck . He passed the first and second state law exams in 1925 and 1928, while in 1927 he was awarded a Dr. rer. pole. and in 1928 Dr. jur. received his doctorate. Then he was an assistant until 1930 at the "Institute for Border and Foreign Studies" in Berlin , which was headed by Karl Christian von Loesch and Max Hildebert Boehm , the "thought leader in ethno-politics" (Ingo Haar). It was there that he worked on his first academic paper, which earned him recognition: Main problems of nationality law . From 1930/31 he was an assistant at the law faculty in Tübingen until he became a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in France and Italy until the end of 1933 . From 1934 to 1937 he worked as a consultant for foreign and public law at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) in Berlin. There he continued to work on his reputation as an expert on nationality issues and was able to publish his most important work for his career, “ Nationality as an essence and legal concept ” (1936/37) for the 25th anniversary of the institute . At the University of Berlin he received his habilitation in 1937 from Viktor Bruns , who was also head of the KWI. After his habilitation , he took over a representation in Göttingen until 1939 . From there he came to the German Charles University in Prague in 1940 , where in 1943 he was appointed professor of public law, especially international law, and headed the “Institute for International and Imperial Law”. At the request of Karl Hermann Frank , State Secretary and later Minister of State to the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia , he became the latter's legal advisor, after he and Konrad Henlein , leader of the Sudeten German Party (SdP), had been at his side with political and scientific assistance since 1934 would have. In 1938 he welcomed “the unification of German Austria and the old Reich soil of the Bohemian countries to form the Greater German State under the strict rule of National Socialism”. Since 1941 at the latest, according to Samuel Salzborn , he has made regular trips to Slovakia and written political situation reports and personal statements for Karl Hermann Frank and the German ambassador to Slovakia, Hanns Ludin . In 1944 he was involved in the suppression of the Slovak national uprising, after he was also active as personal advisor to Theodor Oberländer in the " Special Association of Miners " in 1942/43 . He had been loyal to the Nazi regime to the end, as shown by an article entitled “ European Nationalism ”, which was to appear in honor of Hitler's birthday in 1945 in the March / April issue of the journal Böhmen und Moravia .

After the war, Raschhofer found refuge in church circles in Milan . He was part of the so-called "professors group" of the Gehlen organization , which provided them with studies for a fee. In 1949 he took part in the Oberweiser Conference as a representative of the former National Socialists . He was able to continue his scientific career from 1952, initially as a professor at the University of Kiel and from 1955 in Würzburg . As Salzborn writes, a scientific school has been established around his person. a. the international lawyer Otto Kimminich , Dieter Blumenwitz and the publicist Horst Rudolf Übelacker belong. His influence had an impact on the scientific elaboration of a European national minority law , the results of which were presented in the three volumes “ System of an international minority group law ” published from 1970 to 1978 . The aim was the legal and political foundation of the demand for a reorganization of Europe “without regard to national borders”.

Just as his nationality-political engagement during National Socialism was mainly oriented towards Czechoslovakia and the “Sudeten area”, he also stood up for the interests of the “ Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft ” (SL) after the war until the end of his life in the vicinity of the Association of Expellees . Because of his involvement in the Nazi regime - in addition to his professional activity and his war effort, he was a member of the illegal NSDAP Austria, the Association for German Cultural Relations Abroad and the Nazi Lecturers' Association - he was never prosecuted, but rather acted successfully as "Wolf im democratic sheep's clothing "(Johann Wolfgang Bürgel, 1963), especially with his book" The Oberländer case. A comparative legal analysis of the proceedings in Pankow and Bonn "(Tübingen 1962), in which he thinks the files on the Oberländer case are" an important contribution to the still unwritten history of the tragic fate of the then young generation who joined the NSDAP as a result of cross-border German national work " , "Which almost without exception after a short time came into fundamental opposition to the dogma and practice of the party".

In the legal treatise The Sudeten Question. In 1953, he attempted to prove the development of international law from the First World War to the present , a work commissioned by the associations of expellees, that the Munich Agreement of 1938 was still valid under international law and that the Sudeten regions were still part of Germany under constitutional law . This conclusion was not drawn by Raschhofer / Kimminich (in the 2nd edition of 1988, p. 277), but they continued to assume: “For Germany , the border of December 31, 1937 is not yet in accordance with international law in relation to Czechoslovakia Legal force adult delimitation of the mutual jurisdictions . "

Ethnic group law

Hermann Raschhofer's aim in developing his doctrine of international law was to help the German people gain supremacy in Europe. He saw this as impaired by the "Greater Paris Minority Protection Treaties" (Raschhofer), in which, in addition to considerable territorial losses, especially in the east to Poland , an amalgamation with Austria , which was dissolved as a multi-ethnic state , was excluded. In this context, he also criticized the so-called Beneš memoranda very strongly . In his first award-winning work in 1929 - " Main Problems of Nationality Law " - he criticized the fact that in the new states of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Serbia "the nationalities have to live under the legal status of atomized national individuals under minority law" without the nationality "having their." Members are group-like and organic, namely as historically and culturally positively qualifiable ethnic groups ”. For the nationalities he demanded the connection between “soil and history” and autonomy for the “nationality as a people's personality”. For him, nationality is no longer a minority, but a “totality” with “holy rights”, which is entitled to collective special rights vis-à-vis the “ alien ”, albeit a majority, remaining population, especially since its members, with their inherent ethnicity, exceed their citizenship beyond national boundaries.

In 1936 he wrote in " Nationality as essence and legal concept ":

“In the area of ​​the Volkish there is only one saying yes to one's own unique or the predominant kind, and the abnormal of the theoretically and practically possible case of saying no to one's own kind is sufficiently characterized by the language with the condemning word 'degeneracy' . There is therefore essentially an objectively delimited group of those who can profess a nationality , a nationality as a community of species. If the Nuremberg Laws have made such a limitation by now finally separating alien and conspecifics, whereby the Jewish half-breeds , in whom the German-blood predominates, were allowed to merge into Germanness, then only hopelessly liberal better knowledge can do this as one of the interests of the ethnic groups denote adverse action. "

His involvement in ideas about border colonization , which constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt expressly asserted towards Czechoslovakia, was reflected in proposals for the work of the “Prague East Institute” in 1941, in which he was convinced of the “predominance of Germans” because this people, "which has organized the Eurasian space spiritually, also has spiritual predominance".

In his study of Raschhofer, Samuel Salzborn comes to the conclusion that he wants to deprive the bourgeois nation-state of the possibility of non-recognition of nationalities in the collective sense of the people, "because a legal system that does not recognize the alleged facticity of the nation-state has denied the legitimacy of its actions becomes. The legal method is thus exactly reversed and the right-positive approach based on the principle that the supposedly supernatural and consistent rights of the ethnic minority understood as breaking positive law is replaced by a natural law perspective in the pre-Enlightenment tradition ”.

According to Salzborn, the substance of the work that Raschhofer wrote during his continuing teaching activities on nationality and ethnic group law in Kiel from 1952 and in Würzburg from 1955 does not differ in substance from his publications during the National Socialist era. Nonetheless, Raschhofer is “an immensely influential international lawyer who succeeded in consolidating his reputation as a nationality and ethnic group lawyer under National Socialism, which he had established in the Weimar Republic, and who - without any noticeable substantive changes - continued to profile his approach in the post-war period and scientifically how to represent politically ”. With the Pedagogical Office for Eastern Issues (later Fridtjof Nansen Seminar ) , Raschhofer succeeded in establishing its own academic school on Eastern issues, which, due to its proximity to the expellees' organizations, became the cadre forge of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft.

Contempt for human rights

In 1943 Raschhofer wrote in the paper of the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia :

“That Europeanism, which later moved its temple together with the high priests to Geneva, was understood to mean everything that strived away from the landscape, home and people, from fixed ties and orders to realms and feelings of internationality, to the ideals of 1789 and the Jewish cooperative . "

Raschhofer spoke here of the League of Nations , which he all the evil of the West in the form of the "ideals of 1789", that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights saw come across Germany emerged from 1948, by the minority rights of the individual as a legal subject are bound by the fundamental rights guaranteed to him . It becomes clear that the concept of “ethnic group law” appeals to a “ we-feeling ”, seen from the point of view of the individual who faces the “we” group - its integration in “landscape, home and people” and thus theirs the individual is subject to identity compulsion - insists on his or her right, is considered "degenerate", as Raschhofer wrote in 1936 in connection with the " Nuremberg Laws ". This means that the individual has to reckon with sanctions up to persecution and exclusion at any time if he does not comply with the ethnic group rights postulated by Raschhofer, which are basically de-individualizing constraints and are intended to graft a binding identity on the individual striving away from “ties and orders”.

The “ethnic group concept” is one that has taken the place of absolutism in nationalism , which in alliance with religion and the church put the subjects under pressure. As a quasi-religious substitute for “ties and orders” in secularized societies, it has been challenging scientific reflection for 200 years in the form of “folk ideologems in social and political space”, “which has to struggle with disturbance and astonishment” because the terms of the “völkisch-right-conservative thinking actors” suggest a “emphatically nebulous, strategic approach”.

Remarks

1. ^ Reference to Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt in the catalog of Dt. National Library
2. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 178.
3. ↑ Newsletter of the German Science and Technology, organ of the Reich Research Council (Hrsg.): Research and progress . Staff news. Appointments. tape 19, 23/24 , 1943, pp. 252 .
4. ↑ Quoted in Walter Heynowski / Gerhard Scheumann, The man without a past , Berlin 1969, p. 125.
5. ↑ Samuel Salzborn, Between ethnic group theory, international law theory and national struggle. Hermann Raschhofer as a pioneer of a national minority law , 2006, p. 43 f. (PDF; 142 kB).
6. ^ Samuel Salzborn (2006), p. 47 f.
7. ↑ Thomas Wolf: The emergence of the BND. Construction, financing, control . Ed .: Jost Dülffer et al. (=  Publications of the Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 . Volume 9 ). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-022-3 , pp. 65 ff .
8. ^ Samuel Salzborn (2006), p. 51.
9. ↑ Quoted from Johann Wolfgang Bürgel: Wolves in democratic sheep's clothing (PDF; 118 kB).
10. ↑ So Tobias Weger : "Volkstumskampf" without end? Sudeten German Organizations, 1945–1955 (=  The Germans and Eastern Europe. Studies and Sources. Vol. 2). Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57104-0 , pp. 98 f.
11. ↑ Quoted from Daniel-Erasmus Khan : The German State Borders. Legal historical foundations and open legal questions , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2004, p. 97.
12. ↑ Hermann Raschhofer (ed.): The Czechoslovakian memoranda for the peace conference of Paris 1919/1920. In: Contributions to foreign public law and international law 24, Berlin 1937
13. ^ Hermann Raschhofer, Hauptprobleme des Nationalitiesrechts , Stuttgart 1931, p. 36 f.
14. ^ Hermann Raschhofer, Nationality as essence and legal concept . Reprint from 25 years of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Berlin 1937, p. 45.
15. ^ Hermann Raschhofer: Design of a new scientific facility .
16. ↑ Samuel Salzborn (2006), p. 39 f.
17. ^ Samuel Salzborn (2006), p. 52.
18. ^ Samuel Salzborn: Between ethnic group theory, international law theory and national struggle. Hermann Raschhofer as a pioneer of a national minority law. In: Samuel Salzborn: Divided memory. German-Czech relations and the Sudeten German past (=  The Germans and Eastern Europe 3). Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57308-2 , pp. 37–60, here p. 55.
19. ^ Hermann Raschhofer: The Czechs and the new Europe. Thoughts on the speech of the State Secretary SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank on February 26, 1943. In: Böhmen und Moravia - Journal of the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia , Issue 3–4 / 1943. Quoted from Johann Wolfgang Brügel : Wolves in democratic sheep's clothing. A contribution to overcoming the past. In: trade union monthly books, issue 4/1963, pp. 202–212, here p. 205 (PDF; 118 kB) .
20. ↑ Heiko Kauffmann / Helmut Kellerssohn / Jobst Paul (eds.), Völkische Bande. Decadence and rebirth , Münster 2005, p. 7.

literature

• Heiko Kauffmann, Helmut Kellershohn, Jobst Paul (eds.): Völkische Bande. Decadence and Rebirth - Analyzes of Right Ideology. Unrast-Verlag, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-89771-737-9 ( Edition of the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research in Unrast-Verlag 8).
• Samuel Salzborn : Between ethnic group theory, international law and national struggle. Hermann Raschhofer as a pioneer of a national minority law. In: Social.History. Journal of historical analysis of the 20th and 21st centuries. NF Volume 21, Issue 3, October 2006, ISSN  1660-2870 , pp. 29-52.
• Gerald Steinacher : Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy. Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4026-1 ( Innsbruck research on contemporary history 26).

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Raschhofer in the catalog of the German National Library
• H. Raschhofer: The Sudeten German Party's legislative proposals for nationalities, 1937.
• H. Raschhofer: Development and function of the new national minority law, 1941/42.