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Ernst Janning

Ernst Janning (1885-) was Justice Minister of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. Janning, who had helped draft the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic, sympathized with Adolf Hitler's ultranationalism in the belief that Germany could be made strong again and that Nazism and anti-Semitism were passing phases, and he stayed in office during World War II and the Holocaust because he believed that he could attempt to deliver justice even under the Nazi system. Janning was one of the defendants at the 1948 Nuremberg Trials, during which he confessed his guilt and decried those who shared the dock with him. He and his co-defendants were given life sentences by Chief Judge Dan Haywood, a verdict he agreed with.

Biography[]

Ernst Janning was born in 1885, and he received a doctorate of law in 1907 and became a judge in East Prussia in 1914. Following World War I, he became one of the leaders of the Weimar Republic and one of the framers of its democratic constitution. In subsequent years, he achieved international fame as a great jurist and as the author of legal textbooks used in universities across the world. He became Minister of Justice of Nazi Germany in 1935, and he was responsible for the execution of the laws of the Nazi regime. During his tenure, the seamstress Anni Meunch of Frankfurt am Main and many others were sterilized.

In 1948, Janning, Emil Hahn, Werner Lampe, and Friedrich Hofstetter were put on trial by the Allied court at Nuremberg, but Janning despised his co-defendants, seeing them as "party hacks"; however, Hahn reminded Janning that they had their German nationality in common. During the trial, Janning's defense counsel Hans Rolfe attempted to prove that Janning had remained in power only to preserve justice and the concept of justice, as he had retained a Jewish personal physician during World War II and was said to have helped refugees escape the war. During his trial, he interrupted Rolfe's interrogation of Irene Hoffmann after he continually attempted to get her to "admit" to having an affair with Lehman Feldenstein, only for Hoffmann to weep and repeatedly declare that she had done nothing more than give Hoffmann a fatherly kiss.

Janning later testified that a fever of disgrace, indignity, and hunger had swept Germany after World War I, and there was "fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves" as the result of political instability in Weimar era Germany. He said that, only when Americans understood that, could they understand the appeal of Adolf Hitler, who said that Germans' misery would be destroyed alongside the Jews, communists, and Romani. Janning said that he knew that Hitler's words were lies, but many like him took part in Nazism because they loved their country. He also said that it made little difference if a few political extremists and minorities lost their rights, believing that it would be a stage that would be discarded sooner or later, along with Hitler, as Germany moved forward. He also said that Germany was able to take things under Nazism that it could not take as a democracy, from remilitarizing the Rhineland to annexing the Sudetenland and Austria, and having powerful foreign allies. Janning lamented that what he thought was a passing disease had become a way of life, and he said that he was content fo tend his roses, sit quiet during the trial, and let his counsel speak for him, only to realize that the only way to save his name would be to raise the specter again. He criticized Rolfe for suggesting that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people, that the Nazis sterilized men for the welfare of the country, and for suggesting that the old Jew had slept with the 16-year-old girl after all, saying that it was once again being done "for the love of country." Janning said that, if there was to be any salvation for Germany, one must admit their guilt whatever the guilt and humiliation. Janning confessed that he had reached his verdict on the Feldenstein case before even entering the courtroom, revealing that it was a sacrificial ritual in which Feldenstein was offered up.

When Rolfe protested, Janning reminded the court that Rolfe wished the court to believe that the Germans were not aware of the concentration camps, and he asked where the Germans were when Hitler began shrieking his hate in the Reichstag, when their neighbors were deported to Dachau, and when each village had a railroad terminal to carry deported Jews to extermination camps, and he asked if the Germans were deaf, dumb, and blind. He continued to criticize Rolfe's view that the Germans were only aware of the extermination of hundreds, asking if that made the Germans any less guilty. Janning said that, if the Germans didn't know, it was because they didn't want to know. Emil Hahn shouted that Janning was a traitor before the police restrained him. Janning announced that he would tell the court the truth even if the whole world conspired against it. Janning said that Lampe profited by the property expropriation of every man he sent to a camp, that Hofstetter had sent men to be sterilized before him like so many digits, and that Hahn was obsessed by the evil within himself and was corrupt and decadent. Janning then characterized himself as worse than any of the others, as he knew what they were, and he went along with them. Janning concluded that he had made his own life excrement because he worked with them. Rolfe, following Janning, asked the court if the rest of the world did not know of Hitler's rhetoric and actions, if the Soviet Union was not responsible for its alliance with Germany, if the Vatican City was not responsible for the 1933 Reichskonkordat, if Winston Churchill was not responsible for praising Adolf Hitler in a 1938 speech, and if the American industrialists who profited from Germany's rearmament were not guilty, arguing that the whole world was as responsible for Hitler's Germany as the men on trial and the German people.

However, the evidence compiled against the four Nazi judges, and Janning's own speech, resulted in Chief Judge Dan Haywood finding the four men guilty and sentencing them all to life sentences. Haywood stated that, while Janning was a "tragic figure" and an extraordinary jurist who acted in what he thought was Germany's best interest and clearly loathed the evil he did, compassion for his tortured sole must not beget forgetfulness towards the Nazi government's murder of millions. In the speech given before his ruling, Haywood said that the trial had shown that, under a national crisis, ordinary and even able and extraordinary men could delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggared the imagination, such as men being sterilized for political belief, a mockery made of friendship and faith, and the murder of children. Janning later persuaded Haywood to visit him in prison to give him the records of his trials, to express his respect for Haywood's unpopular and greatly criticized decision to convict the four judges, and to assure him that he never knew that his involvement with the Nazis would come to the murder of millions of people. Haywood responded by saying that it came to that the first time that Janning sentenced a man to death he knew to be innocent. Within five years, all four of the convicted men were released from prison as a means of building German-American relations as the Cold War escalated.

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