War History Online has an
article about German law:
Like many other aspects of German society, the Nazis paid special attention to the justice system to compliment their evil motives. Adolf Hitler authorized a number of significant amendments and additions in the country’s legal code, so that it served Nazi policies. A number of terms were ‘crudely’ defined in order to a accommodate the Nazi agenda and keep an iron grip on the society.
The remnants of the Nazi legal code has survived in the German legal system with Nazi defined lexicons and terminologies. Germany is finally prepared to not only revise all outdated and absurd terms from the legal system, but also to abolish them altogether.
This purge has been made possible as a result of a nine-hundred-page report prepared by a commission of legal experts, who recommended that a major revision was needed to purge the legal system of its Nazi legacy. The report was read and approved by Justice Minister Heiko Maas, who is determined to abolish all Nazi material from Germany’s code. He emphasized that Germany does not have to rely on the laws defined by Hitler and his team, and that country is very much capable of revising any such absurdities.
During the Second World War, thousands of German citizens and soldiers were sentenced to death and executed on suspicion of treason and murder. This affair of defining and issuing death sentence ‘wholesale’ was supervised by so called People’s Court, run by Hitler’s closest aide, Roland Freisler. Historians suggest that, like many other Nazis, Friesler was a sadist and took great pleasure in issuing death sentence. In 1941 he presented a modified definition of ‘murder’ and ‘manslaughter’ to Hitler, who promptly authorized and gave Freisler a ‘license to kill’ his own soldiers and people, the Mirror reports.
According to the report presented to the Justice Minister, these definitions were not only flawed, but were intentionally twisted to serve the Nazi agenda. Most of the crimes were defined on the assumption that the perpetrators were inherently criminals, and no attention was paid towards the nature and implication of the actual crime itself. This gave Freisler authority to deem the accused people as inherently wrongdoers without any chance of being reformed or rehabilitated.
The decision of purging the German legal code of Nazi terminologies has been widely welcomed by all sectors of German society. The German Bar Association and the Central Council of Jews in Germany hailed the reforms, calling this a significant step forward towards a better peaceful Europe.
Rico says better late than never...
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