Normal Service is Resumed

Stuttgart, September 1944: the courthouse sustains extensive damage from nine high explosives and numerous firebombs and yet on the morning after the Attorney General turns up for work and ‘carries on with a number of cases in spite of clouds of smoke still remaining’. Normal service carried on in other places, too, at times in buildings still smouldering and under artillery fire. Benjamin Lahusen has had access to numerous court files – including from the district court for Auschwitz – compiled in the years before and after 1945 and makes a forceful case for the argument that there was no ‘final battle’, no collapse of the state and no interruption to ‘normal service’ when it came to the law. He explains why any pause in the administration of justice was to be avoided at all costs and shows how, after the war, long-serving lawyers carried on working with the everyday laws of the Third Reich as if nothing had happened. If any further proof was needed that there was no Zero Hour for the Justice system in Germany, in May 1945, then it is here, in this brilliantly written book.