German Lawyers and the State in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

Over the course of the late winter and spring of 1933, the German Bar Association (DAV), along with most other institutions in Germany, submitted to “coordination” by the new National Socialist regime. Coordination in reality meant a takeover of the private legal profession by younger lawyers who were National Socialist activists, directed from Berlin. The traditional leadership of the German bar permitted itself to be replaced by newcomers, formerly far removed from the centers of power in professional institutions. Regional lawyers' chambers, despite minor delays and efforts to express solidarity with colleagues in leadership now defined as falling outside of the “racial community,” also succumbed. Within five months, a profession that nineteenth-century reformers had condidered a bulwark of civil soviety, and which had viewed itself as a rock of independence from both state and public, had bowed to the demands of a party whose leader viewed lawyers with contempt and valued race over right.