The Nazi Doctrine
Adolf Hitler's political and propagandist Mein Kampf and Karl Haushofer's geopolitical studies on 'Grossraum' are among the first to come to mind as the major publications on the Third Reich and its territorial ambitions. In the early years of Nazi international law the undoing of the Versailles Treaty and, by implication, the refutation of the 'war guilt' question became the focus of attention and were considered as 'ius ad bellum'.
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A graphic illustration of the refutation of the war guilt question on the part of Germany: Wegerer's Widerlegung der Versailler Kriegsschuldthese, and the preface to the American edition. | ||
During the thirties the Nazi dictatorship needed international law specialists in the Foreign Office and in the Wehrmacht. During the Second World War 'ius in bello' was neither respected nor applied according to the Hague Convention of 1907 or the 1929 Geneva Convention. Particularly in the East the Grossraum requirements simply rendered these norms unapplicable.
Laying down the law Even lawyers slavishly proclaiming and following the Nazi stance in international law were increasingly superseded by close allies of the Nazi regime. Others at the Kaiser Wilhelm research centres and at universities, like the Jewish historian of international law Arthur Nussbaum, were dismissed as Non-Aryan. Karl Strupp (coeditor of the Wörterbuch des Völkerrechts, an encyclopedia of international law, and multiple professor at the Hague Academy of International Law) went into exile, as did the early retired Erich Kaufmann, the great stimulator of Wilhelm G. Grewe (see below). Hans Kelsen from Austria, annexed in 1938, emigrated to the United States and became an authority on international law.
 Propaganda by an advocate of the annexation of Austria, Willy Andreas. |
Even someone like Walther Schücking, Judge at the Permanent Court of International Justice was forced out of Germany. J.H. Herz, under the pseudonym of E. Bristler (his Jewish family was in jeopardy in Germany) wrote Die Völkerrechtslehre des Nationalsozialismus as a warning in 1938. It was translated and partially published almost simultaneously in 1939 in the Political Science Quarterly under the title 'The National Socialist Doctrine of International Law and the Problems of International Organization' (vol. 54, pp. 537-54).
More pro-Anschluss propaganda: Hugelmann's Die Anschluß Deutschösterreichs an Deutschland
At least one international law researcher is prominent in Nazi ideology: Carl Schmitt, who became a Berlin professor. His Nazi version of the Monroe doctrine covers topics like Third Reich's superiority. Minorities' rights (reflecting racial prejudice) and the Nazi mission for Europe are leitmotivs in his 'Kriegsansatz'-thoughts and 'konkretes Ordnungsdenken'. Schmitt's thoughts are expressed in titles like Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte (1939, 4ed.), "Raum und Grossraum im Völkerrecht" in the Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht, vol. XXIV (1941), and Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles (1941).
Post-World War II
After the Second World War Schmitt could not re-enter the new German university. His best known postwar book is Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Ius Publicum Europaeum (1950). This international law monograph, in fact a book on law and international relations within Europe, he is said to have finished as early as 1945.
 A recent English translation of Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde. |
Wilhelm G. Grewe (1911-2000) also came to the fore during the Third Reich as a scholar in Berlin and as a member of Joachim von Ribbentrop's Deutsches Institut für Aussenpolitische Forschung controlled by the Nazis. After the war Grewe became legal advisor to the first president of West-Germany Konrad Adenauer, delegate to the negotiations ending the Allied occupation of Germany, head of the legal department of the West-German Foreign Office, head of the political department of the West-German Foreign Office, ambassador in Washington and Tokyo as well as with NATO, and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. His seminal work is Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte (1984; first manuscript 1944). This monograph reflects discontinuities in the history of international law and follows Carl Schmitt's periodization (or, by proxy, Wolfgang Windelband's) of the international legal order. Most notably, the period between the beginning of the interbellum and the Second World War is characterized as an 'Übergangszeitalter' or transition period. One option was to see it as the rise of American dominance while the other was to prefer it as the re-establishment of the World Order by Germany, Italy and Japan. The book was severely criticized by Martti Koskenniemi, author of The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (International & Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 51.3 [2002], pp. 746-51).
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