6 No. 77 JUSTICE Judgment at Nuremberg needs this invented confession to reach closure: the defendant [unlike in real life] returns to the morality shared by his audience.10 As the film vividly depicts, the moral failure of the Nazi judiciary did not arise at the moment of mass atrocity but began much earlier. Indeed, as Spencer Tracy’s character Judge Dan Haywood says to Burt Lancaster’s character Ernst Janning after the verdict was pronounced, the departure from justice began “the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.” III. From Statute to Sentence: The Institutional Path to Persecution A. The Nuremberg Laws and the Routinization of Racial Policy The Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, marked the formal conversion of antisemitic ideology into statutory law.11 The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of full political membership, reducing them to “subjects” of the state. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor criminalized marriages and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” In other words, what had previously operated through social hostility and administrative exclusion was now embedded in codified law.12 The implementation of these laws required judicial interpretation, evidentiary evaluation, and sentencing. Courts were tasked with determining racial status based on ancestry, parsing genealogical records, and applying complex classifications distinguishing “Jew,” “Mischling of the first degree,” and “Mischling of the second degree.” Judges assessed documentary proof, weighed testimony, and imposed criminal penalties for Rassenschande (racial defilement). The Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935, and Reich Supreme Court decisions expanded these definitions, transforming racial identity into a legally adjudicable category, with ambiguity resolved in favor of exclusion.13 The Katzenberger Trial of 1942 illustrates the culmination of this process. Leo Katzenberger, a Jewish businessman in Nuremberg, was convicted under racial laws despite the absence of credible evidence of sexual relations. The court relied on ideological inference rather than proof, converting suspicion into capital punishment. The language of the judgment remained technical and procedural. The violence lay not in rhetoric but in the normalcy of adjudication.14 Through repeated application, exclusion became ordinary. Courtrooms became sites where ideology entered daily life through indictment, testimony, and sentence. Law functioned as an assembly line: classification, prosecution, conviction. The routinization of racial adjudication habituated legal professionals, and the broader public, to the legitimacy of marginalization and eventual exclusion of Jews from society.15 The transformation was incremental but profound: legalized discrimination acquired the stability of precedent and the authority of judgment. B. Aktion T4 and the Jurisprudence of Refusal In 1939, the regime initiated the program later known as Aktion T4, under which individuals with physical and mental disabilities were systematically killed in state institutions. The program rested on a brief Führer authorization, retroactively dated to September 1, 1939. German homicide statutes, however, remained formally in force. No public law repealed them, and the killings were never legalized through ordinary legislative process. Hitler’s private authorization significantly did not amend the Penal Code. Articles 211 and 212, governing murder and manslaughter, 10. Ulrike Weckel, “The Power of Images: Real and Fictional Roles of Atrocity Film Footage at Nuremberg,” in REASSESSING THE NUREMBERG MILITARY TRIBUNALS: TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE, TRIAL NARRATIVES, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 235, 235–37 (Kim C. Priemel & Alexa Stiller eds., 2012). 11. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS: 1933–1945 67 (Bantam 1986). 12. Robert Gellately, BACKING HITLER: CONSENT AND COERCION IN NAZI GERMANY 122-23 (2001); William L. Shirer, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY 231-34 (1960). 13. Alon Confino, A WORLD WITHOUT JEWS: THE NAZI IMAGINATION FROM PERSECUTION TO GENOCIDE 64 (2014). 14. Ingo Müller, HITLER’S JUSTICE: THE COURTS OF THE THIRD REICH 115-16 (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans., 1991). 15. Id.
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