scholarly journals Prawo osobowe na ziemiach polskich wcielonych do Rzeszy Niemieckiej podczas drugiej wojny światowej

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-514
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kruszewski

The subject of this article are basic questions within the range of civil law. They concern the general position of a human and legal people in the sphere of this law on Polish territory, which was incorporated into the Third Reich. The position of individuals, the citizens of II RP, under the occupation of the Third Reich in years 1939–1945, is analysed by the author not from the perspective of literal meaning of regulations of general part of Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) from 1896, but from the perspective of their specific interpretation, congruent with strategic and ideological purposes of the Nazi regime. In the article, the following issues are touched upon in turn: 1) personal law in terms of classical civil law contra national-socialist regime; 2) racism towards civil rights of a subjective individual; 3) elimination of the Jews from the legal relationships of civil law; 4) difficulties in the sphere of access to certain professions for Polish people and some restrictions upon personal rights; 5) the dependence of possibilities of exercising the private personal right on the consent to denationalization; 6) ban concerning getting married and the right to motherhood and fatherhood; 7) legislation of sterilisation and euthanasia. The formal changes in the legislation which were in force in the Third Reich — except for personal and family law (as well as legal rules connected with it regarding health protection of offspring), and “peasant law” (Bauernrecht) — were not significant, as is proved by the author. The old legal order was reversed in the Third Reich due to its new interpretation: classical concepts and legal institutions were filled with a different content. After the formal extension of BGB to territories incorporated into the Reich, which followed the decree of 25 September 1941 introducing German civil law, these territories became a field of social-political and racial-nationalist experiments, which in fact had a little in common with the German Civil Code’s regulations. A principle of equal access to private subjective rights was respected only in case of German people, i.a. the part which passively gave up to indoctrination. In relation to Jews, racism spoiled in this case the idea and concept of private subjective rights.

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kruszewski ◽  
Leonard Górnicki

ESSENTIAL MANIFESTATIONS OF INTERFERENCE IN SUBJECTIVE RIGHTS OF PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS BY THE THIRD REICHThe article analyzes the most important manifestations of limitation of subjective rights of private individuals by the Third Reich. The authors begin the article by undermining by the national socialist regime one of the fundamental principles, which is equality before the law. Then, the au­thors analyze the violations of particulars individual rights of private individuals.The purpose of the authors is to demonstrate that the self-reliance of aperson Eigenständig­keit has ceased to be an essential element of private law in the national socialist legal order. The sphere in which the subject of law could freely regulate the legal situation created by acts of his will, became clearly restricted. But also, and even more specifically, the sphere of traditionally protected civil rights of private individuals has fallen. The interference of the national socialist regime in the sphere of human privacy followed by changes both in civil and in public law. The existence of a for­mal legal basis was supposed to exclude the unlawfulness of the behavior of the subjects of the law, especially the state, its organs and institutions, but in the light of the idea ofthe law of the civilized nations it was “statutory lawlessness”.


Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.


1942 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-408
Author(s):  
Waldemar Gurian

Are the Germans really behind the Nazi Government? Despite— or because of?—the steadily rising flood of books dealing with the Third Reich this question is answered in most different ways. There is no agreement concerning the relations between the German people and the National Socialist regime. But one's attitude towards the conduct of the war and the post-war problems is, to a large extent, determined by the opinion that one holds about these relations. Therefore, some remarks about the different answers which are given to the question: What are the sources of Hitler's power in Germany? may be of general interest.


Author(s):  
Johann Chapoutot

This chapter describes how the National Socialist party adopted a discourse on the origins of the Nordic race. The Nazis developed a coherent origin myth and provided the German people with a distinguished ancestry because they wished to glorify a nation severely humiliated in 1918, first by a military defeat that was rarely acknowledged as such and subsequently by a peace at Versailles that was perceived as a diktat. This discourse on origins was conceived and transmitted in various ways, including academic and scholarly research. History and anthropology, often perceived as auxiliary sciences, were thrust into the service of the new reigning discipline, racial science (Rassenkunde), producing the kind of scholarship under the Third Reich that its leaders demanded.


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.


1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.


Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.


2009 ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Michael von Cranach

- Michael von Cranach in this paper reports the killing of hundreds of thousands of disabled persons, mentally or physically ill, slaughtered in gas chambers or given lethal drugs, in the Third Reich during the Nazi period. The genocide of helpless and ailing persons (in addition to that of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals) put into operation under the principles of eugenics, defence and health of the Arian race. In reality, the genocide represented a sadistic exercise of power, that alleged itself the right to decide on citizens' life or death. Many physicians connived with the regime and were consequently considered the progressive élite of the medical profession. Keywords: eugenics, defence of the race, biopolitics, exercise of power, scientific and progressive medicine under the Third Reich.


Elements ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Valdez

Throughout the 1930s, the ascendance of the Nazi regime not only diminished the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, but alos directly countered fundamental Catholic doctrines. In face of the mounting atrocities of the German government, Pope Pius XI, with the help of Eugenio Pacelli, nuncio to Germany, and German Bishop Michael Faulhaber, in an unprecedented outreach to the entire German faithful, issued the encyclical <em>Mit Brennender Sorge</em>. Appealing particularly to the youth and the laity, the encyclical challenged Germans to use conscience as a final resort in assessing the validity of a religious institution or political movement. In its address to the German people, Mit Brennender Sorge reflected the delicacy of the relationship between the Holy See and the Nazi regime by not referencing any person, party, or organization specifically. Nevertheless, the purpose and the timeliness of the encyclical was lost on few, partially dispelling the widespread belief that the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the Third Reich.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider

Abstract The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. This article gives a detailed overview of the biographies of Egyptologists in National Socialist Germany and their later careers after the Second World War. It scrutinizes their attitude towards the ideology of the Third Reich and their involvement in the political and intellectual Gleichschaltung of German Higher Education, as well as the impact National Socialism had on the discourse within the discipline. A letter written in 1946 by Georg Steindorff, one of the emigrated German Egyptologists, to John Wilson, Professor at the Oriental Institute Chicago, which incriminated former colleagues and exonerated others, is first published here and used as a framework for the debate.


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