Cities and their architecture often form merely the stony framework of everyday life.
You walk past buildings, barely noticing them, and yet you sometimes get the feeling that the city has changed while you've looked away for just a moment. But some buildings elude this transience. They carry history in their facades.
They reflect the great victories and even greater defeats of civil society.
You don't need to look to Paris, Rome or Berlin for this. Especially for LMU students, a look at the immediate surroundings is worthwhile. Not far from the Siegestor, where the traffic of Ludwigstrasse rushes by, a monumental building with a classical character catches the eye.
The building at Ludwigstraße 28, where macroeconomics and microeconomics are now predominantly discussed, carries a disreputable history within it.
Opened on 13 May 1939 as the „House of German Law,“ it was intended here to carry out the „National Socialist reorganisation of German legal life.“ This reorganisation was to be executed by an institution that gave itself the seemingly objective name „Academy for German Law.“ Naturally, there was nothing objective about it.
Hardly any other institution of the National Socialist state of injustice so clearly shows the attempt to synthesise scientific authority and political power. However, this synthesis was neither law nor science.
The Academy did not conduct independent legal scholarship. It was a National Socialist think-tank whose real task was to translate an ideology into paragraphs, codify injustice, and in this roundabout way, give it the appearance of legitimacy.
The history of this academy is inextricably linked.
The academy was founded on 26 June 1934, with significant impetus from Frank, who at the time was Bavarian Minister of Justice and „Reich Commissioner for the Co-ordination of Justice in the States and for the Renewal of the Legal Order“.
In its founding, personalities from industry, banking, and law wove themselves in, whose participation shows how tightly the threads of economy, science, and politics were intertwined in the Nazi state.
Even more is revealed in this loom. National Socialist institutions did not arise in a vacuum. They grew out of existing academic and economic networks, where personal relationships, economic interests, and political loyalties had long been intertwined.
The academy saw itself as part of a larger project in which the state, economy, and law did not exist alongside each other (controlling each other), but were intended to jointly serve a volkisch and racist dictatorship.
Right from the founding meeting, Frank left no doubt as to the academy's direction. He stated that there was an „urgent state political need for an organisation that is called upon to prepare the renewal of German law in the spirit of the National Socialist worldview according to the principles of strict scientific method.“
This sentence contains, barely disguised, the entire programme along with its methodology. The academy was to outwardly maintain the appearance of objective legal scholarship, while inwardly pursuing a reversal of circumstances, where ideology, rather than the scientific method, would show the way and seek to legitimise itself through it. Science became the costume, and ideology the body beneath.
The aim of the academy was to bring together all teachers of law and state sciences, to reform curricula and teaching materials in the spirit of Nazi ideology, and to influence appointments in the faculties of law. In addition, there was active participation in drafting legislation, reforming legal education, and fostering relationships with like-minded organisations abroad. The academy was thus a central tool for the Gleichschaltung of the legal system, with which the last remnants of the rule of law were systematically destroyed. Legal science was also to be subordinated to the new political power through the staffing of faculties of law, the redesign of textbooks, etc.
Architecture as an expression of totalitarian ambition
In 1934, the Academy was elevated to a public corporation of the Reich. Its administrative office moved to Berlin, but Munich nonetheless remained a centre of its sphere of activity. The Academy held its annual meetings in the Great Hall of the LMU before, in 1939, it was able to move into the purpose-built „House of German Law“ at Ludwigstraße 28, together with the spatially constrained Faculty of Law.
The new building in Ludwigstraße was not just an answer to an acute shortage of space. It was the translation of a totalitarian claim into stone. The classical-style monumental building still bears the imprint of National Socialist architecture, a symmetry that tolerates no doubt, a weight that crushes. The monumental power externally shows what was conceived internally.
The expert report which became an exhibit
Following Frank's presidency, which ended in 1942, the fanatical National Socialist Otto Thierack took over leadership („Legal design is not a science or an end in itself, but a task of political leadership and order. Therefore, the legal design work of the Academy for German Law must be constantly aligned with the objectives of political leadership“).
The fact that their history was erratic does not diminish their ignominious significance. Precisely the combination of scientific language and radical ideology made them a case study in how a modern legal system can be instrumentalised for the purposes of a dictatorship, and from what direction attacks on the legal system can be orchestrated.
Among the academic works with the most far-reaching consequences (for their creators) is an expert report that its „Committee on Nationality Law“ produced in 1940. Under the title „Shaping German Policy Towards Poles According to Ethno-Political Aspects,“ an attempt was made to legally legitimise the colonisation and enslavement of occupied Poland and its inhabitants.
The expert report particularly clearly shows the academy's true function. It was not meant to pursue independent legal scholarship, but to legitimise totalitarian and racist ideology. Terms such as „Volkspolitik“ (ethnic policy) and „Rechtsgestaltung“ (legal design) obscured, in dry administrative language, measures aimed at disenfranchisement, exploitation and tyrannical rule.
The expert opinion found its way as Exhibit 661-PS into the Nuremberg Main War Crimes Trials. The document, which was once intended to legitimise National Socialist policy, thus became evidence of their crimes itself. The legal language that was meant to lend legitimacy to the dictatorship turned against its own creators in court.
Hans Frank was sentenced to death by hanging during the Nuremberg Main War Crimes Trial and was executed on the night of 15–16 October 1946. His demise marked not only the end of the career of a leading National Socialist jurist but also the end of the attempt to subject law entirely to totalitarianism and to create a supposed legal basis for injustice.
The building at Ludwigstraße 28 was badly damaged in air raids and faithfully rebuilt after the war. Today, it houses the Department of Economics. Its past is easily overlooked in everyday life, yet that is precisely why it is worth taking a closer look and consciously appreciating the history of the place.
This post is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. It cannot and is not intended to replace individual legal advice in specific cases. Every situation has particularities that may require a different legal assessment. To assess your personal situation and develop a solution tailored to your case, obtaining qualified legal advice is recommended.