Legal Happenings
At Holocaust Museum Event, Lawyers Reflect on Failures of Rule of Law Under Nazi Germany
March 03, 2026
On February 25 nearly 100 D.C. Bar members toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the program “Law, Justice, and the Holocaust: How the Courts Failed Germany,” held in conjunction with the D.C. Bar Communities and CLE Program.
Kendal Jones, program coordinator for the museum’s Law and Justice Initiative, said the presentation was originally developed as part of a training intended for law enforcement. “It is not intended to be a comprehensive view of the law under the Nazis, or of the courts under the Nazi regime,” she said, “but instead we highlight specific points in the history that we think are relevant for legal professionals.”
An interactive session on case studies invited participants to reflect on the role of legal practitioners in Germany’s descent into fascism. “With all of our programs, but with this program specifically, our hope is that people come away having found relevance in the history — that there’s something in the history that they find particularly interesting, or that they continue to think about as they do their job as a legal professional, as a member of the military, or as a law enforcement officer — so that we can hopefully protect against the incremental failures that the legal professionals under the Nazi regime experienced,” said Jones.
The program, which covered the degree to which German courts and jurists retained a significant amount of independence throughout the Nazi Party’s rise in power, illustrated how individual judges and attorneys either resisted or facilitated the advance of fascism. Jones said that the program, like the museum, is designed to prompt questions rather than simply provide answers.
Using their phones, participants submitted short reflections in response to polls and questionnaires surveying attitudes about judicial collaboration with the Nazi regime. Participants analyzed a case in which a film production company sought to be released from an agreement with a Jewish filmmaker, Henry Koster, arguing that the Reich’s anti-Jewish policies were a compelling reason to terminate their contract.
Alongside legal documents that established and justified Nazi power and policy, history shows that a handful of legal professionals maintained their allegiance with justice over party. One of them was Martin Gauger, a public prosecutor who refused to swear an oath to Hitler in 1934. In a letter to his brother, Gauger wrote that he “could not swear an unlimited oath of loyalty and obedience to a man who is bound neither by law nor the tradition of justice.”
Participants also learned about efforts by Judge Lothar Kreyssig to resist the Nazi Aktion T4 program, which involved the involuntary euthanasia of people held in mental asylums. “They are taking certain mentally ill patients from asylums and killing them, without the knowledge of their relatives, their legal representatives, and the family court — without the guarantee of orderly legal process and without the proper legal foundation,” Kreyssig wrote to the Ministry of Justice in 1940.
Although both Gauger and Kreyssig lost their respective positions as a result of their protests, they demonstrated that resistance to the crumbling of rule of law was both possible and meaningful.
But participants were also confronted with examples showing how brutally the regime punished even minor offenses. One involved Erna Wazinski, a young woman who, after going back to her bombed building to look for clothing, was accused by a neighbor of looting — made a capital offense under the Decree Against Public Enemies. Pleas for clemency were denied, and Wazinski was found guilty and beheaded.
The other case study involved Walter Meyer, a teenager accused of stealing shoes from a bombed-out store. Although the state attorney argued for the death penalty in his case, Meyer’s counsel successfully had the case mitigated due to his young age and prior athletic accomplishments. Meyer was sent to a youth detention facility but survived the war. He told his story in a video recorded by the museum in 1996.
Among those who attended the program was retired attorney David Drachsler, whose father, Leo Drachsler, played a significant role as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials and contributed oral and documentary materials to the museum. “[The program] forces you to think and to consider the concept of complacency, especially as a lawyer, in enabling that which might appear to be legal but is morally wrong,” Drachsler said.
Admission to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is free, and the museum’s collection, highly regarded for its scholarly diligence and emotional power, contains a number of exhibits that are relevant to the law and legal profession’s roles supporting and ultimately dismantling the Nazi regime.
