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Volume 19, Fall 2006
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Nuremberg Trials 60th Anniversary
Justice Case (United States v Altstoetter et al)
The trial of the judges ran between March 5 and December 4, 1947. The highest ranking jurists in the Third Reich had either committed suicide or died before the trial began. Thus the defendants at the Justice Case had not been fanatical Nazis but served their positions without questioning the morality of their behavior. The defendants were sixteen jurists and lawyers: Nine had been officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice and others were prosecutors and judges in Special Courts and People's Courts of Nazi Germany.
View of the Justice Trial from the visitors’ |
Indictment of the Justice Case Defendants
None of the defendants was specifically charged in the indictment with the murder or abuse of particular persons. Rather, the indictment read as follows:
Defendants are charged with crimes of such immensity that mere specific instances of criminality appear insignificant by comparison. The charge, in brief, is that of conscious participation in a nation wide government-organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by the authority of the Ministry of Justice, and through the instrumentality of the courts. The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist. The record is replete with evidence of specific criminal acts, but they are not the crimes charged in the indictment., They constitute evidence of the intentional participation of the defendants and serve as illustrations of the nature and effect of the greater crimes charged in the indictment. Thus it is that the apparent generality of the indictment was not only necessary but proper. No indictment couched in specific terms and in the manner of common law could have encompassed within practicable limits the generality of the offense with which these defendants stand charged.
Telford Taylor’s Opening Statement for the Prosecution of the Justice Case
Brigadier Telford Taylor who made the Opening Statement for the Prosecution in the Justice Case emphasized how the defendants abused the process of law and legal institutions in Germany.
In summary, the defendants are charged with the judicial murder and other atrocities which they committed by destroying law and justice in Germany, and by then utilizing the emptied forms of legal process for persecution, enslavement, and extermination under law.
The true purposes of this proceeding, therefore, are broader than the mere visiting of retribution on a few men for the death and suffering of many thousands. I have said that the defendants know, or should know, that a court is a house of law. But it is, I fear, many years since any of the defendants have dwelt therein. Great as was their crime against those who died or suffered at their hands, their crime against Germany was even more shameful. They defiled the German temple of justice, and delivered Germany into the dictatorship of the Third Reich, “with all its methods of terror, and its cynical and open denial of the rule of law.”
The temple must be reconsecrated. This cannot be done in the twinkling of an eye or by any mere ritual. It cannot be done in any single proceeding or at any one place. It certainly cannot be done in Nuremberg alone. But we have here, I think, a special opportunity and grave responsibility to help achieve this goal. We have here the men who played a leading part in the destruction of law in Germany. They are about to be judged in accordance with the law. It is more than fitting that these men be judged under that which they, as jurists, denied to others. Judgment under laws the only just fate for the defendants: the prosecution asks no other. . . .
The Case of Leo Katzenberger
The case of Leo Katzenberger, a leader of the Jewish community, illustrates how the Special Court in Nazi Germany operated during the Third Reich. Katzenberger had owned a series of shoe stores before the Aryanization decrees of 1938 stripped him of his properties. After losing his business, sixty-seven year old Katzenberger continued to live in one of his buildings and maintained a friendship with the young girl Irene Seiler who rented an apartment from him. During 1941 rumors circulated that something was going on between Katzenberger and Seiler and that Katzenberger was violating the race laws. During the trial in 1942, both denied that there was anything sexual in their relationship. Nevertheless, witnesses at the trial pointed out that Katzenberger had given Irene a bouquet of flowers and both had attended a café together. The presiding judge, Dr. Oswald Rothaug, repeatedly referred to Katzenberger as a “syphilitic Jew” and “an agent of world Jewry.” Katzenberger was sentenced to death.
The verdicts of the Justice Case were not totally satisfactory to the American prosecution. Two undersecretaries, Schlegelberger and Klemm and Special Court judges Tothaug and Oeschey, received life sentences in a penitentiary. Four of the other defendants were acquitted and the rest received prison sentences of five or six years. By the early 1950s, the American and West German authorities began undoing the results of the Justice Case: life sentences were commuted to 20 years and by 1951 all defendants were at liberty, except Rothaug who remained in prison until 1956. Even Schegelberger had been released provisionally in 1950 for health reasons; a year later he was given total freedom.
The film Judgment at Nuremberg is based on the Justice Case. While it is a fictionalized version of what took place, it provides an idea of the way in which jurists of the Third Reich perverted justice to serve the aims of the Nazi regime.
Dr. Lothar Kreyssig
Dr. Lothar Kreyssig |
One judge refused to go along with Nazi orders. Dr. Luther Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenberg, retired rather than follow the Nazis' orders. He had protested the killings of handicapped and the detentions in concentration camps. When the judge discovered that inmates at a local mental hospital were secretly being removed and killed, Kreyssig sent a letter of complaint to the president of the Prussian Supreme Court in which he complained about the "terrible doctrine" that "placed beyond the reach of law" concentration camps and mental institutions. Kreyssig issued injunctions against the T4 program and brought charges against one of its administrators. When he refused to withdraw the injunctions, the Nazis accepted his early retirement.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion:
- What does the case of Dr. Kreyssig tell you about the other judges?
- What happens to a society when the system of justice is politicized?
- Why is it important, as in the American system, to separate the different branches of government—the judicial, the legislative, and the executive?
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September 11th and the Holocaust
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