Existing comment:
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Convincing facade?
Handling of its own past
01 Living a lie? Justification strategies
From the 1950s, the past of BMJ staff tainted by their Nazi involvement was increasingly revealed to the public. The people concerned had to answer to the Ministry and the general public for what they had done. There were recurring patterns of justification:
02 "The war was an exceptional situation"
Dr. Eduard Dreher
• 1943-1945: First Public Prosecutor at the Special Court Innsbruck
• He was involved in passing many death sentences for minor offences
• In 1959, the first case during the Nazi period came to light in which Dreher had applied for the death penalty
• He invoked having complied with the established case law of the Reich Court
The Basic Law had abolished the death penalty. Yet in 1958, Dr. Dreher was still justifying the death penalty in wartime.
"Indeed, the whole issue changes quite fundamentally in wartime. (...) Life imprisonment definitely cannot be a substitute for the death penalty in this case. In wartime, when the whole nation is in mortal danger, deprivation of freedom is in itself a weak measure. This is particularly the case when the convicted person can expect to regain his freedom at the end of the war or even more than that, can expect a reward from a possibly victorious enemy."
Eduard Dreher: Für und Wider die Todesstrafe (For and Against the Death Penalty).
In: Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, volume 70, 1958, page 543 et seqq.
03 "I was only involved in order to prevent worse things from happening"
Franz Massfeller
• Massfeller had worked in the Family Law Division of the Reich Ministry of Justice between 1934 and 1943
• He wrote a commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws
• In 1942, he took part in two follow-up conferences to the Wannsee Conference in which the topics of discussion were the dissolution of "mixed marriages" and forced sterilisation
• At the Wannsee Conference, the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", the genocide of the Jews of Europe, was discussed
04 "I had absolutely no idea..."
Heinrich Ebersberg
• From 1942, he was personal assistant to Otto Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice
• He was aware of countless judicial crimes committed by the Nazis, such as the failure to prosecute "euthanasia" murders or the "special treatment" of prisoners, leading to their death
• In 1969, the judiciary carried out investigations against him as an accessory to the murder of prisoners
• The BMJ initiated disciplinary proceedings against him
• In 1970, the criminal proceedings against him were stopped on account of the statute of limitations due to the "cold amnesty" of 1968
• Ebersberg lost his position as Head of Directorate, however, but remained Head of Division
"As a young person, I had no influence on the then Reich Minister of Justice, whose attitude was absolutely authoritarian."
Note by Heinrich Ebersberg, 1968 |