While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. This volume offers a concise and compelling account of how these intelligent and welleducated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination. The chapters address why German lawyers and jurists were attracted to Nazism; how their support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic selfdelusion; and whether they were held accountable for their Nazi-era actions after 1945. This book also examines the experiences of Jewish lawyers who fell victim to anti-Semitic measures. The volume will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers with an interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the history of jurisprudence.

In National Socialist Family Law, Mariken Lenaerts analyses the possible influence of National Socialism on marriage and divorce law in Germany and the Netherlands. As the family was regarded the germ-cell of the nation, the Nazis made many changes in German and Dutch marriage and divorce law to suit their purpose of a thousand-year Aryan Reich. By making extensive use of archival resources, Mariken Lenaerts gives an overview of the most important changes adopted in marriage and divorce law by the Nazis and proves that although daily marital life in both countries was highly influenced by National Socialism, marriage and divorce law did not become National Socialist. Listen to Lenaerts explaining about her project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TINKR6xKyUQ. In 2013 the book was awarded the Prix Fondation Auschwitz – Jacques Rozenberg.

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

Why did the judges, lawyers, and law professors of a civilized state succumb to a lawless regime? What happened to liberalism and the rule of law under the Third Reich? How many of the legal institutions and how much of their personnel carried over to the West German state after World War II?

Examines Nazi legal theory, the normative ideas driving the Führer state and the legal subtext to the regime's escalating atrocities.

Diese innovative Studie versteht das nationalsozialistische Strafrecht – in Übereinstimmung mit Kontinuitäts- und Radikalisierungsthese – als rassistisch (antisemitisch), völkisch ("germanisch") und totalitär ausgerichtete Fortschreibung der autoritären und antiliberalen Tendenzen des deutschen Strafrechts der Jahrhundertwende und der Weimarer Republik. Dies wird durch die systematisch-analytische Aufbereitung der Texte relevanter Autoren belegt, wobei es primär um die – für sich selbst sprechenden – Texte, nicht die moralische Beurteilung ihrer Verfasser geht. Dabei werden auch Erkenntnisse zur Rezeption des deutschen (NS-) Strafrechts in Lateinamerika mitgeteilt. Die besagte Kontinuität existierte nicht nur rückwärtsgewandt (post-Weimar), sondern auch zukunftsgerichtet (Bonner Republik). Kurzum, das NS-Strafrecht kam weder aus dem Nichts noch ist es nach 1945 völlig verschwunden. Der zeitgenössische Versuch der identitären Rekonstruktion des germanischen Mythos durch die sog. "neue Rechte" schließt daran nahtlos an.