Nov. 9 marks 80 years since Nazis and others across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia
participated in the wave of anti-Jewish violence known as Kristallnacht.
In the end, 91 people were murdered, thousands of businesses looted, and some 30,000 Jewish men imprisoned in concentration camps. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kristallnacht "was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate with the Holocaust."
To mark the solemn occasion, and The American Bar Association has released a historical book that details how Nazi Germany systematically undermined fair and just law through humiliation, degradation and legislation leading to expulsion of Jewish lawyers and jurists from the legal profession.
According to the ABA, “Lawyers Without Rights: The Fate of Jewish Lawyers in Berlin after 1933” details what can happen when the just rule of law disappears — and is replaced by an arbitrary rule by law that sweeps aside the rights and dignity of selected populations.
The book contains more than 1,600 bios of lawyers in Berlin who could no longer practice law after 1938 because of their Jewish ancestry, and notes the fate of 1,404 of them, including scores who committed suicide and more than 200 who found their way to the United States, as well as some who became lawyers here.
This most recent edition also includes forewords from Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court; Benjamin B. Ferencz, at 99 years old the sole-surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials; and Ronald D. Abramson, a Jewish lawyer and philanthropist whose family foundation, the Anne and Ronald Abramson Family Foundation, provided underwriting for this book.
New Jersey State Bar Association members receive 15 percent off all American Bar Association books. For more information, click here. (login required).
To learn more about the book, click here.
In addition, the New Jersey State Bar Association, through the work of the Foundation, provides guidance to middle and high school educators charged with teaching the horrors of this historical period. How to Teach the Holocaust is an interactive workshop designed to give educators the pedagogy behind successfully teaching the Holocaust.
The program is a partnership between the New Jersey State Bar Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League and is free for educators. To learn more about this resource, and to sign up to find out when the next training will happen, click here.