At least under German law at that time? I mean every country has laws against murder, but did Adolf Hitler actually change the German penal code to formally legalize the killing of Jews, Roma, etc?
Whether German law was changed or not is irrelevant.
From the wiki entry for the Nuremberg Trials and the London Charter:
I know that, but did Hitler ever bother to change German law?
Clearly it is relevant, because that’s what the OP asked about.
my WAG is that it would have been against the law at the time. I remember cases (sorry no cites) of german military officers refusing to help with civilian massacres. They were not court marshalled, but quietly reassigned.
It’s clear that Hitler did in fact change German law, starting with the Nuremberg Laws, which led directly to the Kristallnacht massacre and mass deportation in 1938.
In any event, the London Charter defined Crimes against humanity as:
That’s the thing about totalitarian states - it’s legal if the government says it’s legal.
There’s a film about the Meeting of top Nazi officials where they discuss the “Final Solution” and one lawyer dude keeps harping on how what they are proposing isn’t legal. Damn if I can remember the title.
The OP has asked about German law.
I bet you’re talking about the film “Conspiracy.” It’s near the top of my Netflix list. I hear its good.
-FrL-
The Nuremberg Laws were German law.
However, I believe it is pretty rare for totalitarian states to have written laws that explicitly allow the murder of ethnic minorities. Sure, there are laws against treason, there are laws against disrespecting the leader. But there also aren’t written laws that say the secret police have the right to rape prisoners in their custody. Of course the secret police can rape and murder with impunity, but that’s not because the law says the secret police can rape and murder with impunity, it’s because no one has the power to stop them.
Of course, people are also killed by totalitarian states according to the written laws of the totalitarian state. So the law says it is treason to criticize the leader, and the penalty for treason is death, and you hold a trial that establishes that such and such a person criticized the leader, and this person is taken out and shot. But it also happens that a person who criticized the leader gets a visit from the secret police, and the police just pull out their guns and summarily shoot them. In the first instance the killing was legal according to the written law of the totalitarian state, in the second instance it wasn’t.
To answer the OP, the Reichstag (the German parliament building) was burned by an arsonist on February 27, 1933. As a response to this, the “Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State” (commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree) was issued on February 28. It gave the German Chancellor (Hitler) special powers to protect Germany. This included the power to overrule existing laws. On March 23, this power was expanded by the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation” (commonly known as the Enabling Act) which gave Hitler and his officials the power to create new laws by decree. So from that point on, Hitler’s orders had the authority of law.
Must . . . fight . . . the urge . . . to compare this too . . . :smack: Stop now! :eek: Don’t bring politics into GQ :o pretend to respond to OP :dubious:
Yes, it was allowable under German law at the time.
Excellent film! Here’s a little about the meeting.
CMC fnord!
When did the Reichstag pass the Act that essentially said that Hitlers will was basically the law? Everything after that is technically legal, assuming the legality of the Nazi state in general.
Little Nemo is spot on. After all, it’s the politicians who make laws. I just want to amend Little Nemo’s answer by mentioning that the Enabling Act required a two third majority, which was achievable only after the Communist delegates and several Social Democrats had been arrested or were in hiding.
I think you can say that Hitler’s rule by decree was unconstitutional. So any laws passed by his cabinet was not legal. And while Germany never passed any laws sanctioning mass murder, byt they did pass a bunch of anti-Jewish laws over the years.
Let me guess… You were about to compare the situation under discussion to the Nazis? I don’t think Godwin’s law really applies here. 
Hugo Chavez, surely.
You are referring to the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) of 23 March 1933. Its wording was rather short - it merely stated that acts could not only be passed by the Reichstag but also by the Cabinet. Originally, the period of this was limited until 1937, but the act was prolonged after four years.
It is a much debated question among German lawyers whether the holocaust was technically legal. The consensus is that it wasn’t. Legislation which the Nazis passed in order to legalize it is considered void according to a doctrine (called “Radbruch’s formula,” named after the legal scholar Gustav Radbruch who developed it in 1946) that statutes which contradict the basic rules of humanity must not be obeyed, even if they are formally correct. Sadly enough, the German courts started underpinning and applying this doctrine more precisely not after 1945, but after the failure of communist East Germany in 1989. Specifically, it has been invoked to punish East German border troops which shot citizens trying to cross the border to the West illegally. This was formally legalized by East German legislation, so Radbruch’s formula was applied as a reaction to criticism that punishing these troops would violate the prohibition of retroactive punishment.
Doesn’t this presuppose, though, that there are basic rules of humanity, and also that they’re somehow self evident?