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No End to History
The Current Ministry's Handling of its Own Past
"There is no end to history. Even today, there are dangers to humanity and freedom that jurists, in their respective positions, have to resist. A knowledge of history can sharpen people's senses when human rights and the rule of law are being called into question again. In order to reinforce this ethos, the injustice caused by German jurists should be a compulsory subject in jurists' training."
Excerpt from the speech by Heiko Maas, former Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection
01 Consequences
"The Rosenburg Files" showed the failures of the past. Now consequences have to be drawn for the present.
For much too long, jurists in Germany understood themselves to be apolitical legal technicians; this attitude made many of them accomplices of Nazi injustice. Today, jurists should live and defend the values of the Basic Law – human dignity, individual freedom and social diversity. In order to further strengthen this ethos, Nazi injustice should become an obligatory subject of legal training.
The Federal Ministry of Justice has launched a new in-service training programme and has commissioned a study of its official building in Berlin. As part of Berlin's Jewish textile-making district, many of its former owners and users were murdered in the Holocaust. All the Ministry's employees should be aware of this past and of the responsibility each and every one of them has for a free state under the rule of law.
The work on "The Rosenburg Files" was accompanied by many public symposia. These events and this exhibition are intended to encourage other institutions also to deal with their own past and to ask what each of us can do today to protect human dignity, freedom and diversity.
02 Self-Criticism
"The Rosenburg Files" also prompted many older people to ask themselves self-critically how they dealt with the Nazi contamination of leading jurists in the past. Dr. Hans-Jochen Vogel was Federal Minister of Justice from 1974 to 1981. In late 2016, he gave his opinion on camera on his own responsibility and the consequences of the historical findings. |