Lex iniusta non est lex: The Nuremberg Justice Case (United States v. Josef Altstötter et al.) from a historical-legal perspective

Abstract

This article examines the Nuremberg Justice Case (United States v. Josef Altstötter et al., 1947) as a landmark judgment concerning the criminal responsibility of judges, prosecutors, and officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice for crimes committed through judicial and administrative procedures. Its central aim is to reconstruct the legal standard developed by the U.S. Military Tribunal under Control Council Law No. 10 and to explain why this standard was later weakened in the jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany. The analysis combines historical-legal, dogmatic, and philosophical methods. First, it presents the dismantling of the rule of law in the Third Reich and the transformation of courts into instruments of racial and political persecution. Second, it examines the Katzenberger case as a paradigmatic example of judicial murder, based on the manipulative combination of racial legislation, wartime decrees, and degraded evidentiary standards. Third, it analyses the post-war doctrine of Rechtsbeugung, Richterprivileg, and the problem of subjective awareness of illegality as mechanisms that limited the prosecution of Nazi judges. The article argues that the Justice Case operationalised the maxim lex iniusta non est lex by imposing on legal professionals a duty to refuse participation in manifest injustice. It concludes by proposing a typology of state crimes of adjudication and a threshold test for identifying when adjudication becomes an instrument of crimes against humanity.