The Nature Of The Nazi State And The Question Of International Criminal Responsibility Of Corporate Officials At Nuremburg : Revisiting Franz Neumann’s Concept Of Behemoth At The Industrialists Trials
▻http://nyujilp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/43.4-Lustig.pdf
Après la lecture de cet article on comprend mieux pourquoi les juges soviétiques du premier procès de Nuremberg expriment souvent un jugement différent de celui des juges désignés par les alliés de l’Ouest. En 1947 le conflit entre l’URSS et les puissances de l’Ouest empêche leur participation aux cours de justice internationale.
Ce sont alors uniquement des juges de pays capitalistes qui décident sur la responsabilité pour la guerre et les massacres et du sort des industriels allemands. En conséquence les juges sont obligés de baser leurs démarche sur des paradigmes, textes de lois et définitions juridiques qui ne fournissent pas d’arguments suffisants pour identifier la responsabilité des chefs de l’industrie nazie.
Les idées politiques et juridiques de l’Ouest servent à justifier et stabiliser un système économique identique à celui qui conduit à l’introduction du système nazi en Allemagne. Par des jugements reconnaissant ce fait le système économique et politique de l’Ouest aurait été mis en question. A cause de cette proximité entre le monde des juges et des coupables il est impossible pour les tribunaux des vainqueurs occidentaux d’identifier et de juger les profiteurs économiques du nazisme.
Le texte suivant décrit les détails de ce dilemme sans le nommer explicitement.
German industrialists did terrible things during Nazi rule. Yet, they were not held responsible for most of these acts at the subseqeunt trials at Nuremberg.1 History provides several explanations for this impunity gap. In this article I focus on the influence of a conceptual gap on this result. This article explores how various conceptions of the Nazi totalitarian state influenced the prosecution and decisions of the Industrialist Trials at Nuremberg. Drawing on archival materials, I argue that the debate over the Industrialist responsibility could be read as a struggle between competing theories of the totalitarian state.
This paper exposes how Franz Neumann (1900-1954), who was involved in the Nuremberg trials during its early stages, informed central elements in the prosecutors’ theory of business responsibility at Nuremberg.2 Inspired by the *967 Hobbesian terminology, Neumann used the antinomy of the Behemoth archetype as a contrast to the common understanding of the modern state as a Leviathan. For Neumann, like many others, the Hobbesian Leviathan embodied a conventional conception of the modern state. In that conception, the state is the sole entity which exercises monopoly over violence within a specific territory. In its totalitarian form, the Leviathan exercise of control is cohesive and absolute. Unlike the understanding of the Nazi state as a Leviathan, the Behemoth model lacked a centralized control over violence and was characterized by competing authorities.
These conflicting theories of the Nazi regime proved highly consequential for the allocation of business responsibility at Nuremberg. The prosecution, who followed central aspects in Neumann’s theory of the Nazi state as Behemoth, argued that the industrialists were equal partners with other groups such as the party and the military in the decision to go to war and in practices of spoliation and enslavement. In terms of structure and operations, the Behemoth theory of the totalitarian state focused on its incoherence and lack of rule of law. The judgments of the Tribunals, though different from one case to another, chose to depict Nazi Germany as a mega-Leviathan. These epistemological choices translated to different theories of responsibility. In the Neumanesque scheme, businesses shared responsibility equally with other actors. In the *968 strong Hobbesian state, envisioned by the Tribunals’ decisions, the companies were subordinates of the state, both in the decision to go to war and later in the involvement in its crimes. But the judges at the Industrialist Trials also followed the Neumannesque lead, conveyed by the prosecution. Though choosing to regard the Nazi state as Leviathan, they implicitly accepted the importance of the state as a key to establishing criminal responsibility in international law. The emphasis on the state and its structure is evident in their reasoning, but departs from a description of the Nazi state as Behemoth. Instead, the decisions described the Nazi totalitarian state as reminiscent of the Hobbesian Leviathan; a state characterized by complete control, coherence, and authority over the Industrialist actors.
The judges’ choice of the Hobbesian theory was not incidental. The notion of the state as a monolithic power that monopolizes violence is often a default-position in the theory of international legal responsibility. But the Hobbesian model of the state is an ideal-type. Neumann’s critique sought to expose the extent to which the Nazi regime deviated from this ideal-type model. The Tribunals’ insistence on a functioning Leviathan in Nazi Germany significantly limited their ability to scrutinize the practices of business actors. Regarding the ideal-type of the Leviathan as an assumed reality undermined its normative significance. At the same time, the prosecutors’ use of Neumann’s Behemoth ran the risk of interpreting his critique as an acceptance of this model as a basis for responsibility under international law. My critique, therefore, is not a call to follow the prosecutors and adopt Neumann’s model as a basis for international criminal responsibility. Rather, Neumann’s critical analysis is examined here to expose the need for an informed understanding of the state, and the political regime more broadly, in a theory of responsibility in international law.
The state is not the only corporate structure considered in this article. Alongside the theory of the state, I expose the disregard of the company itself, its corporate structure and governance as well as its relationship with the institutions of the state. The article critically examines the ramifications of this disregard. I argue that understanding these corporate structures (of the state and the company as well as the relationship between them) is essential for a theory of individual responsibility *969 of business officers in international law. Indeed, the greatest novelty of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT) was the recognition of individual responsibility under international law for the commission of international crimes.3 According to this historical precedent, “the screen between international law and the individual, normally constituted by state sovereignty, was pierced.”4 However, the attempt to “pierce the sovereign veil” of the corporate entity of the state, and later the company in the Industrialist Trials, without an informed understanding of the structure of authority that constituted them, had the problematic consequence of reifying both.
Die Transformation des Ausnahmezustands. Ernst Fraenkels Analyse der NS-Herrschaft und ihre politische Aktualität
▻https://docupedia.de/zg/Fraenkel,_Der_Doppelstaat
Le social-démocrate Ernst Fraenkel développe sa théorie du double-état après avoir exercé le métier d’avocat sous les nazis jusqu’à son émigration. Il ne resoud pas le dilemme capitaliste mentionné plus haut et sert aujourd’hui aux adeptes de la théorie du totalitarisme à développer l’idée de l’identité des système oppressifs nazis et stalinistes.
Wie Carl Schmitt dachte Fraenkel das NS-Regime vom Ausnahmezustand her. „Die Verfassung des dritten Reiches ist der Belagerungszustand. Die Verfassungsurkunde des dritten Reiches ist die Notverordnung vom 28.2.1933.” Mit diesen Sätzen begann Fraenkel seine Analyse des Doppelstaats. Aber während Schmitt nur absolute Zustände des Entweder-Oder kannte und 1921 eine bloß „kommissarische Diktatur”, die die bestehende Verfassung für eine begrenzte Zeit suspendiere, von der „souveränen Diktatur” unterschied, die eine „wahre Verfassung” herbeizuführen suche, um wenig später jenen berühmten programmatischen Satz zu formulieren: „Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet”, dynamisierte Fraenkel den Gedanken des Ausnahmezustands.
Sein „Doppelstaat” war die Analyse eines politischen und rechtlichen Transformationsprozesses.
Nach dem Krieg war Fraenkel bis 1950 als Legal Adviser der US-Behörden in Südkorea tätig und an der Ausarbeitung der südkoreanischen Verfassung beteiligt. Anschließend wurde er Berater des amerikanischen Hohen Kommissars in Deutschland und nahm 1953 einen Ruf als Professor für Vergleichende Lehre der politischen Herrschaftssysteme an der Freien Universität Berlin an. Seine theoretischen Überlegungen für ein modernes, pluralistisches Demokratiekonzept prägten die Politikwissenschaft der folgenden Jahrzehnte.
Mit seinen Analysen zum Nationalsozialismus befasste sich Frankel kaum noch. Erst als 1969 eine Neuauflage von „The Dual State” in den USA erschien, gab er dem Drängen vieler seiner Freunde nach und stimmte einer deutschen Ausgabe zu, die aus dem Amerikanischen rückübersetzt werden musste.
Es kennzeichnet die theoretische Anschlussfähigkeit des „Doppelstaats”-Konzepts, dass jüngst auch Forscher auf Fraenkel Bezug nehmen, die sich mit der Geschichte der Sowjetunion beschäftigen. Stefan Plaggenborg zum Beispiel hat Fraenkels Konzept in innovativer Weise umgedreht und nach den Bedingungen gefragt, wie sich aus der Anomie des Bürgerkriegs und dem stalinistischen Maßnahmenstaat Ende der 1950er-Jahre ein sowjetischer Normenstaat ent-wickeln konnte.
THE NORMATIVE AND PREROGATIVE STATE — Helen Suzman Foundation
▻http://hsf.org.za/resource-centre/hsf-briefs/the-normative-and-prerogative-state
In a land mark study of government in the Third Reich[1] , Ernst Fraenkel distinguished between the normative and positive state. His thesis has been given crisp expression as follows by Richard Evans:
On the one hand was the ‘normative state’, bound by rules, procedures, laws and conventions, and consisting of formal institutions, such as the Reich Chancellery, the Ministries, local authorities and so on, and on the other there was the ‘prerogative state’, an essentially extra-legal system that derived its legitimation entirely from the supra-legal authority of the leader.
1942 - Review of The Dual State : A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, By Ernst Fraenkel, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
LAW QUARTERLY Vol. 27
▻http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3934&context=law_lawreview
Lenhard on Wildt, ’Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion : Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939’ | H-Antisemitism | H-Net
▻https://networks.h-net.org/node/2645/reviews/6717/lenhard-wildt-hitlers-volksgemeinschaft-and-dynamics-racial-exclusio
Wildt refers to Ernst Fraenkel’s book The Dual State in describing two apparently contradictory political spheres which were constitutive for the National Socialist reign of terror: on the one hand, the “normative state” under the rule of law, which was valid only for members of the Volksgemeinschaft; on the other hand, the violence of the paramilitary groups SA and SS, who drew the boundaries between “us” and “them.”[3] The application of Fraenkel’s theory enables Wildt to withstand the fashionable addiction within social sciences to Carl Schmitt’s existentialist distinction between friend and foe—a distinction that justifies rather than explains the struggle against the Jews.[4] Consequently, Wildt strictly deals with Schmitt only as a historical source. And yet one has to bring to mind some crucial problems in Fraenkel’s theory as well: Is a state that suspends parts of its constitution and imprisons the political opposition still under the rule of law? Is thus a concomitance between the “normative state” and the “prerogative state” even thinkable?
Wildt solves these problems by painting the picture of a multiple power structure with competing factions within the framework of the National Socialist state. The fight between these groups—or, as Max Horkheimer put it aptly, “rackets”—revealed a corrosion of the state’s monopoly on violence and led to new dimensions of anti-Semitic attacks (p. 147).[5] Regional chapters of the NSDAP and the SS behaved differently and sometimes even contradictorily; local non-party members occasionally joined boycott actions against Jewish shops or damaged Jews’ property. But Wildt makes clear right from the start that the “bystanders” and “passers-by” were also part of the National Socialist project—deliberately or not. Either one was “in” or “out”—tertium non datur, although the status of “Aryans” could change quickly with regard to their behavior. Passivity under these circumstances meant participation, and thus the creation of the Volksgemeinschaft needed a public stage where people could either partake in the “play” or just remain part of the audience.