Lawyering in impossible times: remembering Nazi Germany’s treatment of lawyers

An analysis of three insightful books on the persecution of Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany demonstrates that even in the most difficult circumstances, it is possible to keep making a difference to people's lives; that the spirit of resistance can be nurtured even when it is impossible to exercise the right to speech, assembly and association; and that an oppressed advocate can still be the advocate against oppression.

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THE fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany is relatively well known, but till the publication of German political scientist Simone Ladwig-Winters' book 'Lawyers without rights: The Fate of Jewish Lawyers in Berlin after 1933' by the German Bar Association, there was little attention paid to the fate of Jewish lawyers as a grouping.

'Lawyers without rights' is an extraordinarily moving documentation of what happened to Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany. Jewish lawyers comprised a significant section of the Bar in Weimar Germany; the Nazi capture of power led to them being progressively restricted from practicing the law and eventually eliminated from the legal profession.

The fate of Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany is important to understand from two aspects. Firstly, from the viewpoint of the method used by the Nazis to target Jewish lawyers, which combined both violence on the street as well as the use of the law. Secondly, to understand the important role that lawyers can play in any legal system. The reason for targeting Jewish lawyers is because lawyers could exist independent of the State and, wittingly or unwittingly, strengthen the voice of resistance to the policies of the Nazi State. Lawyers, if allowed to function unhindered, would have, through their practice, been an impediment to the unconstrained lawlessness of the Nazi rule.

The fate of Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany illustrates this progressive radicalization of the State and society, as it imposed more and more controls based on a blatantly racist viewpoint.

We often think of the end point of Nazi rule being the Holocaust, but fail to see that the Holocaust itself became thinkable and doable because of a range of steps which led up to it. The fate of Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany illustrates this progressive radicalization of the State and society, as it imposed more and more controls based on a blatantly racist viewpoint.