Exploring the Discursive Construction of Obedience: An Analysis of Application Letters for the Position of Executioner in Hitler’s Germany

This article presents an empirical investigation into the construction of obedience in letters of applications mailed to National Socialist authorities for the position of executioner between the years 1933 and 1945. To this end, a corpus of 178 letters of application was compiled, annotated, and analyzed using the corpus analysis toolkits Antconc and Lancsbox. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus was conducted. The findings were related to and interpreted from the perspectives of applied legal linguistics, stylistics, and legal history. The project aims to explore the construction of a shared discourse of obedience and how this discourse is operative in the letters of application. Drawing on an explorative interdisciplinary framework, this project seeks to answer the following research questions: Is obedience a construct in applicants’ letters of motivation? Which linguistic devices and discursive strategies are used by the executioners to express submission to officials of the National Socialist state? Are there variants of the construction of submission by applicants?

Entre-mundos: a travessia dos refugiados do nazifascismo. Brasil, 1933-1945

This article aims to sensitize our reader to the issue of forced migrations by Nazi violence that, from 1933 onwards, had consequences beyond Europe, including several countries in Latin America. Persecuted, frightened and humiliated by the national socialist state and collaborationist countries, the Jew had nowhere to go, as not all nations expressed the desire to adopt him as a citizen, as a human being bearing his own name and roots. Among those who chose Brazil as a refuge, temporary or permanent, we identified hundreds of artists, writers and scientists who turned their works into libels against intolerance. Through the artistic and literary production of this group, we intend to assess their perceptions of Europe destroyed by Nazi barbarism, interpret their traumas, their visions of “abysses” in the context of chaos and the meaning of life in the face of possible death

COOPERATION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH FASCIST AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST STATE REGIMES: PROBLEMS OF LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY

The article raises the problems associated with the need to prosecute the Vatican for crimes againstpeace and humanity committed by the Catholic clergy during the Second World war 1939–1945. The authoron the basis of monographic studies, documents, court verdicts and normative-legal acts proves that thebloody genocide of Orthodox Serbs was carried out systematically by the ustashe fascist government thanksto the ideological support of the Latin priesthood. For crimes that do not have a Statute of limitations, itis proposed to deprive the Vatican of sovereignty, force it to admit its guilt for organizing the genocide ofOrthodox Serbs during the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941–1945, as well as for the destruction and seizureof Orthodox churches to recover monetary compensation in favor of the victims and their descendants,including the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Legal Methodology in the German Dictatorships

The article compares the legal methodologies in the National Socialist State (NS, 1933–1945) and in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949–1990). Their concept of law differed in a significant way from the preceding periods. Law was no longer regarded as the will of the community but as the will of the dictator (the ‘leader’ or the party) and at the same time as the utterance of the official ideology. This antinomy between voluntaristic and ideological principle characterises the legal methodology in both dictatorships. The theories of the sources of law are dominated by the voluntaristic, authoritative element. Therefore, the will of the ‘leader’ or the party, i.e., the statute, is the only real source of law. Customary law is negligible, judge-made law is not approved, a court’s right of inspection doesn’t exist. The ideological principle gains much greater importance in the interpretation of the law. In the NS, the law must be interpreted in accordance with the ‘National Socialist ideology’, in the GDR, which is ‘partially’ socialist, according to the communist ideology. The former voluntaristic ‘subjective-historical’ interpretation is abandoned. Jurisprudence in the NS and GDR also demanded ideological, ‘essential’ concepts, whereas the precedent ‘bourgeois’ theory preferred ‘functional’ concepts according to the specific purpose of a statute. The formation of systems failed in both dictatorships, probably because of the ideological setting.

The Legal History of the Dual State

This chapter aims to take an objective view of the appeal of National-Socialism. However, it is argued, people who had an ambivalent attitude toward National-Socialism suffered from two principal misconceptions. Firstly, the German ideology of Gemeinschaft (community) is just a mask hiding the still existing capitalist structure of society. Secondly, this ideological mask equally hides the existence of the prerogative state operating by arbitrary means. Any critical examination which attempts to reveal the social structure of the National-Socialist state, it is stated, must discover whether or not the essential criteria of the dual state have appeared in any earlier historical period. The chapter, therefore, looks in detail at the history of the dual state in Prussia and Germany as a whole.