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Standard legal work, named after a prominent Nazi lawyer: So far insufficiently researched and for a long time little publicly discussed
Photo: Marco Stepniak / IMAGO
According to a report by the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), the long-standing namesakes of two standard legal works were not only followers, but committed protagonists of the Nazi regime. From 1938 onwards, Otto Palandt published the commentary on the German Civil Code (BGB) at the Munich C. H. Beck Verlag, which is still authoritative today, and Heinrich Schönfelder published the collection "German Reich Laws" in the same publishing house from 1931 onwards, which was renamed "German Laws" after 1945.
As an "important lecturer" and, above all, as president of the Reich Judicial Examination Office from 1934 onwards, Otto Palandt made a "very significant" contribution to the fact that young lawyers "internalized political-ideological guidelines as the new standards and norms". With regard to his commentary, he had "never distanced himself from the deeply anti-Semitic and racist revaluations of the BGB on the part of National Socialism" during the Nazi era, but rather had acknowledged "the arbitrary, anti-Semitic and racially motivated dimensions" of National Socialist civil law and given them legitimacy. His denazification, completed in 1948, was characterized by "exculpatory narratives and a selectively presented vita" – Schönfelder was first classified as a "follower", then – at his appointment – even as "exonerated".
According to the historical sources, Heinrich Schönfelder was "already one of the right-wing extremist enemies of democracy in the Weimar Republic, who were striving for a fascist dictatorship in Germany". As early as 1929, he had incorporated his völkisch-nationalist attitude into the study literature he founded, "Test Your Knowledge", in which he constructed case studies "suggestively and manipulatively along anti-Semitic and anti-socialist stereotypes". In his main profession he had worked "as a politically extraordinarily reliable civil servant and judge convinced of National Socialism in the sense of the Nazi regime", including as a Wehrmacht judge from 1940 to 1944.
Both plants bore the names of the incriminated persons until 2021 - and are still central tools for lawyers today. "Test your knowledge" also still exists. According to historians, the characters designed by Schönfelder were found in it until the sixties. The fact that the two authors of the Munich C. H. Beck publishing house were active under National Socialism has been known for some time, but has so far been insufficiently researched and has also been little discussed publicly for a long time. Even a commemorative publication published by C. H. Beck Verlag in 2016, on the occasion of the 75th edition of the BGB commentary, which was still called "Palandt" at the time, did not deal with the Nazi biography of its namesake at all.
In particular, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Georg Eisenreich, had finally persuaded the elderly publisher Hans Dieter Beck to rename these two works in 2021, as well as a commentary on the Basic Law, which until then had also operated under the name of a publisher incriminated by the Nazis. At that time, Eisenreich had also commissioned the IfZ report, which is now to be presented next Wednesday in Munich.
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