The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

by Richard J. Evans

The judges were all the more independent because the vast majority of them regarded laws promulgated by legislative assemblies rather than by a divinely ordained monarch as no longer neutral but, as the chairman of the German Judges’ Confederation (which represented eight out of the roughly ten thousand German judges) put it, ‘party, class and bastard law … a law of lies’. ‘Where several parties exercise rule,’ he complained, ‘the result is compromise laws. These constitute mishmash laws, they express the cross-purposes of the ruling parties, they make bastard law. All majesty is fallen. The majesty of the law, too.’154 There was some justification, perhaps, in the complaint that the political parties were exploiting the judicial system for their own purposes and creating new laws with a specific political bias.