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Here is the story my mother told me. It was in late 1941 when she noted that Sally Cohen, an older gentleman and respected citizen (so she thought) had to wait in the corner of the neighborhood bakery store until everybody else was served. She also noted that he was now wearing a monstrous star-shaped yellow badge that said, \u201cJude.\u201d My mother was 11 at the time and to this day hasn\u2019t forgotten the sad and embarrassed look on Herr Cohen\u2019s face. When she asked the adults why Herr Cohen was treated that way, she was told not to worry and that all of this was mandated by a new law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The notion that everything in the Third Reich was done\n\u201caccording to the law\u201d has always puzzled me. By voting for the Enabling Act in\nMarch 1933, the democratic parties had abdicated, more or less voluntarily, and\ntransferred absolute power to the government. Hitler was free to write laws as\nhe pleased and as perverse as he and his legal experts wanted them to be. Legal\nexperts? Browsing through the \u201cWho\u2019s Who\u201d of Hitler\u2019s helpers it is astounding\nto see how many career-obsessed academics and law scholars were willing to sell\ntheir soul to the Nazis for the prospect of landing a prestigious job or\nprofessorship. In many cases, these positions opened up because they had been held\nby Jews who were forced to resign. One of the most notorious Nazi apologists\nwas Carl Schmitt who called the Nuremberg Race Laws a \u201cconstitution of freedom\u201d\nbecause \u201cthey freed Germany from the un-German concept of liberalism and\nequality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Find that outrageous? In an interview with the Financial\nTimes, Russia\u2019s strongman Vladimir Putin called liberalism \u201cobsolete\u201d the other\nday. Viktor Orb\u00e1n proudly promotes his \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d model in Hungary\nand gets applause from fellow wannabe dictators in Italy and other European\ncountries. And in the US, self-declared nationalist and Brexit fan Donald Trump\nhas surrounded himself with people like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo who don\u2019t\nlike liberalism either, at least not the 21st-century version that offers asylum\nto immigrants and marriage to same-sex couples. Well, they can\u2019t recruit Carl\nSchmitt anymore to rewrite human rights law, but they can always copy and paste\nfrom the Bible. This is what Pompeo\u2019s new Commission on Unalienable Rights\nseems to have in mind when they talk about reducing human rights to God-given\nor \u201cnatural rights.\u201d I am guessing the human right to healthcare will be off\nthe table too, since there is no mention of health insurance in the New\nTestament and resurrection from the dead is guaranteed anyway. God-given rights\nand natural law have been used to legally camouflage mankind\u2019s most horrific\nactions including slavery, the crusades, and the Thirty Years\u2019 War that left a\nthird of central Europe\u2019s population dead. Not to forget Gottesgnadentum<\/em> (the divine right of kings) which would come\nin really handy for Pompeo\u2019s boss if he wants to transition from a 4-year job\nto a life-time appointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hitler also claimed that the \u201cdivinely ordained law of\nnature\u201d was at the heart of Nazi ideology and jurisdiction and never got tired\nto enlist the support of the Almighty in his speeches. Alas, the law is only as\ngood as the people who make or interpret it. I keep wondering if all the adults\nin that bakery store in 1941 really thought the Nuremberg Race Laws were \u201cgood\u201d\nor if they were just rationalizing their guilty conscience away by pointing to\nthe law. Children apparently sensed that something was fundamentally wrong.\nAfter Sally Cohen and his wife were deported in 1942, the official word was that\nthey were \u201cresettled to the East.\u201d His textile and fabric store was confiscated\nby the Nazis and sold for very little money to his former competitors. For\nthem, I assume, there was no question that it was a \u201cgood\u201d law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the summer of 1943, my grandparents\u2019 house and the bakery next to it burned to the ground during a bombing raid by the Allies. There were only a few things that survived the fire because they were stored behind a steel door in the basement. Among them is a table cloth that has never been used and still has the store\u2019s label and handwritten price tag attached to it. It is from Sally Cohen\u2019s store. Occasionally I take it out of the drawer, look at it and have a hard time trying to wrap my head around the past and the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education and currently a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota. He\u2019s at schro601@umn.edu. On Twitter: @HenningSchroed1.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/files\/2019\/09\/fullsizeoutput_30f6-1024x768.jpeg\")