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Nazi Law and Art Looting

Leila Amineddoleh had the honor of contributing to Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg. Her chapter was about the ways in which the Nazi Party enacted laws to seize property and loot art, and ways that courts are now grappling with those laws to restitute property. Read more about the book from Bloomsbury Press.

 

About Nazi Law

A distinguished group of scholars from Germany, Israel and right across the United States are brought together in Nazi Law to investigate the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis used the law as a weapon, mainly against the Jews, to establish and progress their master plan for German society.

The book looks at how, after assuming power in 1933, the Nazi Party manipulated the legal system and the constitution in its crusade against Communists, Jews, homosexuals, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious and racial minorities, resulting in World War II and the Holocaust. It then goes on to analyse how the law was subsequently used by the opponents of Nazism in the wake of World War Two to punish them in the war crime trials at Nuremberg.

This is a valuable edited collection of interest to all scholars and students interested in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Table of contents

List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword, Lorenz Reibling (Boston College, USA)
Acknowledgements

Introduction
John J. Michalczyk (Boston College, USA)

Part I – A Judicial System without Jews and without Justice

1. Politics, Ethics and Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Germany, 1900-1950, Douglas G. Morris (Federal Defenders NY, USA)
2. Our Enemies Have No Rights: Carl Schmitt and the Two-Tiered System of Justice, Paul Bookbinder (University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA)
3. Defining the Jew: The Origins of the Nuremberg Laws, Oleksandr Kobrynskyy (University of Nuremberg-Erlangen, Germany)
4. Vichy France and the Nuremberg Laws, John Romeiser (University of Tennessee, USA)
5. The Judenräte and the Nazi Racial Policies: Ethical issues in Claude Lanzmann’s Last of the Unjust (2013), Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan (Haifa University, Israel)
6. High Treason in the People’s Court, John J. Michalczyk (Boston College, USA)

Part II – Hippocrates Abandoned by Nazi Doctors

7. Resistance or Complicity: Medical and Religious Responses to Law under the Third Reich, Johnathan Kelly, Erin Miller and Michael A. Grodin (Boston University, USA)
8. Homosexuality and the Law in the Third Reich, Melanie Murphy (Emmanuel College, USA)
9. Physicians, Psychologists, and Lawyers as Torturers: From WWII to Post 9/11, George Annas and Sondra Crosby (Boston University School of Public Health, USA)
10. Nazi Medicine and the Holocaust: Implications for Bioethics and Professionalism Education, Ashley Fernandes (Ohio State University, USA)

Part III – Economic Policies and the Stripping of the Jewish Community

11. The German Plunder and Theft of Jewish Property in the General Government, David M. Crowe (Elon University, USA)
12. Nazi Laws Used to Plunder Art and the Current Legal Tools Used to Unwind Looting, Leila Amineddoleh (Fordham University and New York University, USA)

Part IV – A God Subverted by Nazi Policy

13. The Hereafter versus the Here-and-Now: Catholicism under National Socialism, Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College, USA)
14. Nazi Persecution of German Protestants, Christopher Probst (Maryville University, USA)
15. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich, Gerhard Besier (Dresden University, Germany)

Part V – To the Victor Belongs Justice: At Nuremberg and Beyond

16. German Courts in the Maelstrom of Criminal Guilt: Tracing the Rise of Collective Responsibility in Nazi Death Camp Trials, 1963-2016, Michael Bryant (Bryant University, USA)
17. The Devil’s Chemists on Trial: The American Prosecution of I.G. Farben at Nuremberg, Mark Spicka (Shippensburg University, USA)
18. Nazi Experiments, the Nuremberg Code, and the United States, Sandra H. Johnson (St. Louis University School of Law, USA)

Epilogue, John J. Michalczyk (Boston College, USA)

Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“This fine collection of essays explores how law came to serve as a tool of destruction in the Third Reich and as a means of moral reconstruction in the postwar years. It offers a timely and valuable intervention in ongoing debates about the capacity of law to deform and reform societies.” –  Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College, USA

“From a wide variety of perspectives, the contributors to this book underline the supreme importance of the rule of justice and the horrifying consequences of its neglect. Well-written and thought-provoking.” –  D.W. de Mildt, editor of Justiz und NS-Verbrechen / Nazi Crimes on Trial, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands