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The Rule of Law, Nazi Law and War Crimes Prosecutions: Resources

This guide highlights resources to support students in the BLS seminar: The Rule of Law, Nazi Law, & War Crimes Prosecutions

Introduction

BLS librarians and Library Fellows Jess Issacharoff and Bea Runk developed this guide to support the fall 2025 seminar: The Rule of Law, Nazi Law and War Crimes Prosecutions taught by Douglas G. MorrisAdjunct Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School and Attorney, Federal Defenders of New York.  Please refresh this web page each time you visit.  

  • Excerpt from course description for The Rule of Law, Nazi Law and War Crimes Prosecutions: How can we make sense of the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany committed crimes too enormous to imagine? This course will try to grapple with that question, not from the point of view of the Holocaust's evil, a problem for philosophy and theology, but from the point of view of its lawlessness, a problem of legal history. What shared legal assumptions existed before the Nazis came to power, how did Nazi Germany's exterminatory theory and practice attack those assumptions, and how did the post-Holocaust international community try to restore them?

Click here to view: hours when students can check out Reserve books at BLS Library's Circulation Desk + hours when students can obtain help from the reference librarian "on duty."  Feel free to email: askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or text: 718-734-2432.  Our Library Fellows often will be staffing the Circulation Desk on weekdays at lunchtime - they want to gain experience helping our researchers.

Books & Book Chapter by Douglas G. Morris, Adjunct Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School & Attorney, Federal Defenders of New York

Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (2005)

1 print copy (call # KK185.H57 M67 2005) is on Reserve.  

Contents: pt. 1. Nonpolitical Foundations & Political Maturation (1883-1922). Childhood, Law, and War (1883-1918) -- The Crystallization of Hirschberg's Political Consciousness (1918-19) -- The Emergence of Hirschberg's Politically Active Lawyering (1919) -- A Left-wing Lawyer in Right-wing Munich (1920-22) -- pt. 2. Revolutionaries & Counter-revolutionaries Before the Bar of Injustice (1922-25). Sitting in Judgment on Germany's War Guilt: The Fechenbach-Cossmann Libel Lawsuit -- "Left-wing Treason": The Fechenbach Prosecution -- The Fight to Undo the Fechenbach Verdict -- A German "Dreyfus Affair": The Rule of Law, Reaction, and Honor in the Fechenbach Case -- The Antiwar Veteran and the Militant Monk: The Stab-in-the-Back Trial -- From Political to Nonpolitical Justice -- pt. 3. Freeing the Innocent: Nonpolitical Miscarriages of Justice (1925-34). Of love and Death: The Pfeuffer and Götz Cases -- Falsehoods in the Countryside: The Rettenbeck, Perjury Conspiracy, and Konrad S. Cases -- Hirschberg, Freud, and Other Germans -- The Crises of War, Confidence, and Democracy in the Weimar Republic's Nonpolitical Justice -- pt. 4. Fighting Hitler, Nazis & Antisemites (1926-33). A Brawl in the City Streets: The Schoot Persecution -- Crossing Swords with Hitler -- A Brawl at a Village Inn: The Murnau Persecution -- Taking the Offensive against Antisemites -- Honor, Violence, and a Brawl Among Nazis -- pt. 5. Three Countries, Two Continents, One Ideal of Justice (1933-64). Nazi Law and Lawlessness: Hirschberg's Final Year in Germany (1933-34) -- Between Escape and Safety: The Years in Italy (1934-39) -- Freedom, Democracy, and Justice (1939-64).

Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany (2020)

In BLS Library's catalog record, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (CAMBRIDGE).  BLS Library provides multiple digital copies of this ebook.

Contents: Introduction -- 1. Setting the Scene of a Jewish Lawyer, Like Fraenkel, in Nazi Germany -- 2. Fraenkel as a Social Democrat Practicing Law in Nazi Germany -- 3. Fraenkel as an Essayist Supporting the Illegal Underground -- 4. Fraenkel as a Scholar Renouncing the Nazi Regime's Dual State -- 5. Thinking about Legal Justifications for Sabotaging a Tyrannical Regime -- Conclusion: The Ernst Fraenkel Dilemma.

Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg (2017)

In BLS Library's catalog record, click: ACCESS ONLINE VERSION - (EBSCO). BLS Library provides an "unlimited" number of digital copies. 

Professor Morris is the author of Ch. 1: Politics, Ethics and Natural Law in Early-Twentieth-Century-Germany, 1900-50.

Contents: Part 1. A Judicial System Without Jews and Without Justice -- Part 2. Hippocrates Abandoned by Nazi Doctors -- Part 3. Economic Policies and the Stripping of the Jewish Community -- Part 4. A God Subverted by Nazi Policy -- Part 5. To the Victor Belongs Justice: At Nuremberg and Beyond.

When Was This Guide Last Updated?

Jean Davis, Jessica Issacharoff and Beatrice Runk updated this guide on Dec. 2, 2025.