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These German children are in their garden reenacting a war that they were far too young to have taken part in. They were born in 1900 and the First World War had planted in their hearts the bitter seed of grief and defeat. Some of them would later become the driving force of the Nazi party. And to impose their vision of a renewed Germany, they would attack the law and pervert its rules. The law is a weapon that the Nazis turned to in order to take Germany and its society by storm. A weapon for the self-defense of the race. That was the law for the Nazis.
The individual disappeared as a subject of the law and was replaced by the community of the people. There are thousands of sounds, images, and documents. All the pieces of this puzzle must be assembled to see how law and justice became the weapons of a crime. At the heart of Hitler's courts, lawyers and magistrates would play their part in a pitilous war to bring to heal the judicial system. Some remarkable destinies shed light on this story. Lilo Khnitzki, a committed young lawyer and pioneer in a profession which was until then reserved for men, but also Verer Best, lawyer and Nazi. Johan Reichart, last in a famous line of Munich executioners,
and Hans Littton, barristister, Democrat. In 1931, One affair revealed to everyone that the law was a vital issue for the Nazis. From the beginning of the 1920s, Adolf Hitler's Nazi party was defying the courts and the institutions. In the streets, their militia, the Stormtroopers, or the SA, were beating up and murdering opponents, and communists in particular. They openly defied the young VHimar Republic. Many of them were accused of acts of political violence and sent for trial. And over 8 years, the Nazi party were the object in almost 2,000 court cases. But the trial that opened on the 8th of
May 1931 stunned the whole of Germany. For this time, Hitler himself was summoned. the leader of the extreme right in court. Excitement gripped the streets of Berlin in the warm spring of 1931. The instigator of this earthquake was a young barristister, Hans Littton. He was 27 and familiar with cases against the Nazis. For this new trial, he had decided to prove that Hitler was a threat to the system. Stormtroopers had fired at some communists in a Berlin dance hall, a run-of-the-mill case. But this time, Hans Littton was determined to make life difficult for Hitler.
Eight months previously, Hitler had taken an oath before the tribunal of the rich in Lifick, and he had sworn to respect the law and never have recourse to violence. For Litton, it was a simple calculation. Prove that Hitler, as head of the party, was responsible for the atrocities committed by the SA. To everyone's astonishment, the young barristister issued a summon against Hitler and called him as a witness. In room 664, Hans Littton was ready. He held a document signed by Joseph Gubbles, head of propaganda and loyal to Hitler. In this brochure, Nazi, Joseph Gerbles laid down guidelines for militants on how they should behave.
It was written, "All we wish to do is free Germany, nothing more. If the people do not want to be freed, we do not care. We will do it without their consent." Further on, it says, "The will to be in power creates the means needed for that power." During the hearing, Hans Littton confronted Hitler with his statements. Hitler knew that he was cornered and it showed. He finally had to distance himself from Gerbles, declaring that text has not been authorized by the party. In the end, he was yelling and screaming in the chamber. What right did Litton
have to dare ask him these questions? He shouted that the party respected the law and would always do so. At 1809, Hitler's court appearance ended. Would the question of perjury be raised? The verdict would come in 10 days. But Hitler's rage had caused a scandal and he had to be called to order. In Germany, law courts are also temples and Hitler had just blasphemed. Germany held its breath as it awaited the verdict. And even more so did Lilo Kaznitzki, the young democratic lawyer. She had followed the details of the trial with her journalist brother. Hans Littton was her friend at university and he was defending the
democracy that she believed in. To learn more about Lilo, you have to go to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. That's where her file is kept in the silence of the archives, row two, box 229. Lilo's real name was Elizabeth. She was the eldest daughter of Martin Kuznitzki, a doctor of Polish origin who was Jewish on his mother's side, and Elizabeth Lilian, a Protestant from Denmark. The family was certainly quite well known in Cologne. Lilo had grown up in an educated and cultivated family. After attending a Protestant school for girls, she took her balora, which was fairly unusual. She then decided to go on to university.
Like Hans Littton, Lilo belonged to the stratum of young people that VHimar had fostered by encouraging many of them to go to university so as to rebuild the elite decimated by the Great War. For Lilo, Vhimar also meant women's right to vote. And like many other young women, she was emancipated, smoking, sometimes wearing men's clothes, going out alone, and making love as she wanted. Lilo was happy in this free and tolerant world. She wanted it. She defended it. That's why she wanted to be a lawyer. She didn't merely study, she also got a doctorate. And in 1927, she also obtained a first job at the regional tribunal in Cologne,
convinced that at the heart of the democracy of the VHimar Republic, she would be able to fight for justice. Kimhan, it was this democracy she loved so much that the Nazis were threatening and she understood the risks that Hans Littton was running. From the start of the trial, he was pursued by the hatred of militant Nazis and was no longer safe in the street. Hitler himself, while waiting to know what the political consequences of this affair would be, had to face ridicule. During his court appearance, a young photographer called Leo Rosenthal took this photo. Hastily taken, it is a little blurred, but it captures Hitler's panic as he faced Littton. [clears throat] He is stunned, dazed by the confrontation.
The photo immortalizes his collapse. Hitler would never forget Hans Littton. Especially as the day after the trial, the Democratic press was not slow to rub salt into the wound. The press recounted Hitler's agony. How for more than 3 hours, Litton inflicted on him a pitilous interrogation. How he put his finger on Hitler's contradictions one by one. How Hitler got himself in a tangle, was furious, lost his temper. And yet the verdict finally delivered by the tribunal was very lenient. The front pages of the newspapers announced only very mild punishments for the thugs of the SA and for Hitler, no further action.
The editorials considered it a political verdict that showed the benevolence of the conservative judges regarding the head of the Nazi party. Barely a few days after this resounding trial, quite a different event gripped the public. At the UFA Palat Cinema in Berlin, the filmmaker Fritz Lang's new film M the Cursed, often known simply as M, had its opening night. In this film, an elusive killer is terrorizing a town. As they discovered the plot, Berliners got a strange feeling. Fritz Lang's M is basically a film that shows the Nazi counter society. The underworld, the mob, crooks, the criminals portrayed in the film are clearly a metaphor for the Nazi
organization which appears in the film as a criminal organization. It shows the incompetence, mismanagement or inefficiency of traditional institutions and it's also clearly a film about the Nazi conception of the law which is debated at the end. In the script, the underworld and the common people capture the killer and organize a secret trial. This kangaroo court challenged the system. It rejected official justice and imposed its own idea of law exactly the way the Nazis did in real life. The film was an instant success and without doubt Fritz Lang savored it, remembering that the original title was Killers in Our Midst.
Even though M the Cursed is a piece of cinema, Fritz Lang's imagination was born of grim reality. In the autumn of 1931, a new affair burst onto the scene. And once again, the leader of the Nazi party was center stage. A few months earlier, when Hitler was battling with Hans Littton, a young overzealous Nazi militant was drawing up plans for a coup d'eta in the event of a communist threat. His name was Verer Best. and he was a very younglooking and brilliant lawyer. And after his law thesis, he joined the NSDAP, the Nazi party, with the number 341338.
An anti-semite and ideologically close to the extreme right, he belonged to the radical and nationalist youth that was gradually taking over in the universities. Once his studies were completed, this young militant became an associate judge in his native region of Hessa. After his day's work in the solitude of his office, he had drawn up a plan for a coup d'eta. In autumn 1931, this document was leaked to the press under the title The Boxheim Papers. It immediately caused a scandal. A few days later, on the way to Munich for the meeting, Verbess was shaking in his boots.
He could think of nothing worse for this first meeting with Hitler. He knew he had to put his party in a very delicate position just before the elections. Best was conducted into Hitler's office. And when he was finally face to face with the furer, nothing happened as he had imagined. For Hitler, even if a tactical error had been committed, best conformed to most of the normative criteria that befitted a state activist. And that was exactly the kind of attitude that Hitler hoped and prayed for. And so in fact, Hitler had to reprimand the young national socialist at the beginning, telling him, "Listen, old boy, you could have saved us having that
image. But when it comes down to it, that's how you have to carry on." Better still, while Best was struggling and some members of the party demanded that he be thrown out, Hitler came publicly to his rescue. Surprising benevolence indeed, especially as everyone knew Hitler's contempt for lawyers, as this phrase related by his followers shows, it used to be actors they buried in the communal grave. Nowadays, they should bury lawyers there. Hitler clearly had a social and intellectual complex with regard to anyone who had an education and especially lawyers. Basically to loa the lawyers in Germany was rather equivalent
to rejecting or criticizing technocrats in France. It's roughly the same. Indeed, in his great moments of demagoguy in his speeches to workers, Hitler said, "I am one of you. lawyers and the law have always held an important place in the German system. There is a special place for the training of lawyers in Germany. A unique training that also gives the opportunity to exceed to the highest levels in politics, to the highest ranks in the civil service. The law is one of the royal roots. Lawyers therefore are among those elite people who are never far from power. So despite the contempt he felt for them, Hitler understood very early on that he had to count on that body of people.
The rising generation in the universities like Verer Best were radical and despite the aversion they felt at first for the populism of the Nazis, these young people gradually joined and became the majority in the student bodies. This nationalistic and anti-semitic youth was an ideal hunting ground for the party of the swastika. At the end of the 1920s, those people were at the end of their studies and faced a future of unemployment with the crisis of 1929. And that is when schemes for canvasing young doctors appeared, notably young doctors of law to encourage them to join the party. Not only so that they would have a status, mission, a job, but better still to open the possibility of
an absolutely marvelous career. When he joined the NSDAP, Verbest was hoping to play a role in politics. And that was where the Boxheim affair ruined everything. It even cost him his post as a judge. But at the same time, Best had just had a crucial encounter, the SS. This was Hitler's bodyguard, handpicked Nazis, radical and committed to embody the elite of the future thousand-year Reich. Their leader was Hinrich Himmler and he had spotted Verer Best. So it was with a new number 23377 that Best put on his SS uniform.
The SS recruited three types of people. The first type were lawyers, second type managers and engineers, and the third type specialists in social sciences. Together they could combine political radicalism, academic excellence, and bureaucratic efficiency. And at the same time, they recruited people who mostly made up a functioning elite, which enabled the SS to penetrate the state institutions, either local or federal, of German society. In the summer of 1932, the economic situation was not good. One German and three was out of work.
Among them was Johan Reichart. He was the last in a line of executioners who had formerly been wealthy. Like many of his countrymen, he had now fallen on hard times. There were relatively few executions under the Vimar Republic. So he had to find other ways to feed his family. Thus he was for a time an inkeeper. Then he sold religious pamphlets around the villages. Then finally he went and settled in the Netherlands to sell vegetables. When an execution was planned, they sent him a telegram from Bavaria. He then had to go to Munich to carry out his work as an executioner.
He always arrived on time. July 10th, 1932. In the train that took him back to Munich, Johan Reichard was doing some thinking. Since he had been living in the Netherlands, it was only the second time he had been called on to officiate his executioner. This time it was a woman, a first for him. After the execution, Reichard went into town for a few beers with his associates. They confirmed that the atmosphere had changed since he left. And as the elections drew near, it became more like a climate of civil war. So he was fairly relaxed about taking the train back to Holland. There, his wife and three children were waiting for him in their small Amsterdam flat.
2 weeks later, he learned the results of the elections. With 37.3% of the votes far ahead of the Social Democrats, the Nazi party became the country's first party. In Germany, the news was like a bombshell. However, long months of negotiations were needed before at last, on January 30th, 1933, Marshall Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. On this day, January 30th, 1933, Lilo's father, Martin Kaznitzki, read the news in the morning paper. The appointment of Hitler to the post of chancellor foreshadowed dark days to come. Nevertheless, the Kiskis decided to go off on holiday to the mountains. After all, the democratic press recognized the legality of the process that had brought Hitler to power.
And then, although he had to appoint Hitler, old Marshall Hindenburg was still president of the country. He was a hero of the Great War, and his presence was comforting. There were only three Nazis in the right-wing coalition. Yet the lawyer Wilhelm Frrick became home secretary and Guring was made prime minister of Prussia, the biggest of the German regions. These were key posts for controlling the police. To contain the Nazis, Hindenburg named his ally, the conservative France von Poppin, as vice chancellor. He was a political veteran and was supposed to keep the situation under control. But would he be up to it?
Some, like Lilo, were worried about the trivialization of the Nazis discourse, and Hitler traveled up and down the country, using his newfound legitimacy as a formidable megaphone. UNDER THE NATURAL ON THE TOUCHES OR THE TOUCHES RIGHT I [screaming] SEE C AFTER. After the fire in the rice stag, Germany was in a state of shock. The convenient arrest of a communist suspect allowed the Nazis to wave the threat of a plot. Immediately, Hitler got Hindenburg to put a signature to an exceptional measure. In the morning of the fire in the Reichstag on the 28th of February 1933,
an order was signed by Hindenburg, an order for the protection of the people and the state, conferring almost unlimited powers on the executive, on the government, and that's to say on the police. Straight away, the Nazis began a wave of arrests. Hans Littton, the lawyer who had ridiculed Hitler a year and a half earlier, was sound asleep when someone violently hammered on his door. Hitler had not forgotten him. His name was among the first on the list. He was taken immediately to Spandow prison. The arrest went on for several days.
Dozens of other notables soon joined Hans Littton behind bars. members of parliament, journalists, intellectuals, or writers, most of them opposed to the Nazis. Totally dumbfounded, Hans Linton watched the rules of the legal system being sabotaged. In other words, as from 28th of February 1933, people in Germany were no longer in a state governed by the law. There was no legal control. You could be arrested, placed in custody in a concentration camp without motive for an indeterminate time, undefended, and beyond the control of the judiciary.
Soon, Hans Littton was transferred to a camp at Sonnenberg. The guards at the camp were members of the SA and wore the armbands of auxiliary police. This proved that between the usual members of the judiciary and the arbitrary Nazi policemen, any distinction was suddenly blurred. Verer Best, now legal consultant in the SS, was now one of those given the task of establishing the legal framework for these arrests. And thanks to him, as with the arrest of Hans Littton, the police always turned up with an authoritative document.
The Shutzh was a tool invented before the Nazis came to power. But Verer Best belonged to that amalgam of policeman/ lawyer/smilitant that brought it up to date, rewrote it and brought it into the legal and administrative arsenal of the Third Reich. We can see it in the letterhead, the state secret police. It was a police decision, but the paper was mauve because the color mauve was the color for legal decisions, judicial decisions. In other words, the issue was deliberately obfiscated and a legitimized form was given to a purely police decision by making it seem to be a judicial decision. So there was no control by a judge. There was no longer any respect for basic freedoms.
The Nazis were to cross another decisive line only 3 weeks after having put an end to fundamental rights and individual liberties. There reigned a climate of intimidation backed by the massive presence of the SA when on March 23rd the first meeting of the new parliament was held. Supported by the new exceptional measures, Hitler commanded the MPs to accord him full powers. The next morning on March 24th, the law was passed by 444 votes to 94. From then on, Hitler governed alone.
Without having touched the Constitution, he had set up a dictatorship. but what community was Frick referring to and who among the German people could still claim to belong to it you could only be in the community if you were of the German race of German blood the essential corollery of community in the Nazi sense there are other types of community race obviously and it was also being in what the Nazis came to call the Fura's geol shaft. The geol shaft was that group that followed the furer, the chief with unconditional obedience, with an absolute loyalty. FOR TITAN.
It's hard to imagine today this invisible dangerous frontier. colleagues and neighbors who were familiar to them, the friends they openly confided in. Never again would the Germans be able to look at them in the same way. In the Berlin Jewish Museum, you can find evidence of the day when Lilo Kaznitzki discovered that she was on the wrong side of that invisible line. On the morning of April 3rd, the police came to the family home. As it happened, she was not there and it was Martin Kitzki, Lilo's father, who opened the door. The policeman said, "I want your daughter's passport." Martin Khnitzki was busy and paid little attention to the policeman.
The policeman made this a pretext for lodging a complaint for defamation. He was being somewhat overzealous. 1 M13033 was the number of the file that Inspector Young immediately opened against Martin Kitki for some obscure motive. The only thing that could possibly explain that was that Elizabeth or Lilo Kaznitzki was probably politically committed and consequently was in the sights of the authorities and therefore the police. As from the 30th of January 1933, there was a policy that the Nazis called the glyon that could be translated by bringing to heal but which means indexing, synchronizing, putting to one side in short centralization, rationalization, purggation and as it happened the legal world was rapidly
purged by the law of 7th of April 1933. This was a law that affected the civil service and which stipulated that all friends of the national union government, thus people on the left, were excluded from the civil service. Moreover, the Jews had an exemption starting with war veterans, but that was soon done away with. The associations of solicitors and of lawyers followed very swiftly without being consulted or with the friendly suggestion that they should take notice of this law. In other words, that what applied to the civil service would also apply to lawyers, solicitors, etc. And therefore there would be a host of professional bans laid down sometimes violently since at the judiciary tribunal of Berlin essay troops had
burst in and violently thrown out the judges and lawyers they considered to be on the left or Jewish or worse still both altogether. together. There were thousands of lawyers, solicitors, and magistrates who were sacked or forbidden to practice. In Prussia, Guring alone, since he was now prime minister, dismissed 28% of top civil servants. Other victims of the purge were university professors of law. Carl Schmidt, then considered to be the greatest legal mind, approved. And on May 1st, he joined the Nazi party. As for Lilo, a lawyer from a half-Jewish family and political activist, she became a target. But she wasn't yet caught up in the
purge. And unlike the 38,000 people who were already leaving Germany, she stayed in the country. Fritz Lang chose to leave with the first wave of immigrants. And though he chose exile, he saw the dark institutions of his film M the Cursed become reality. In just a few months, an avalanche of laws and decrees descended on Germany. The Nazi plan was taking shape and Hitler did not act alone. After Guring, who was extending his powers, after Frick at the interior ministry, other loyal followers saw their powers increase. Gibbles at the propaganda ministry, R at the head of the SA, Himmler in charge of the SS and the Bavarian police. To comfort public opinion and the political class, the conservative France Girtner was left in
his post as Minister of Justice. But in Hitler's wake came a number of Nazis who had been loyal from the very beginning. In particular, Hans Frank, Hitler's former lawyer, and Roland Frysler, Secretary of State in Prussia and one of the most radical ideologues. For them, above all, Frysler, the law and justice were weapons to be used in the internal war against the enemies of the German nation and the German race. If the law is a weapon, you need soldiers. Roland Frysler called them the armored divisions of the law, a warlike term that mainly applied to the young generation of lawyers. Hundreds of law students about to get their degrees took the trains to Utubberg, 90 km south of Berlin.
There, in a camp where they would spend 8 weeks, these future lawyers and public prosecutors underwent a physical and ideological retraining, all under the supervision of Roland Frysler. for the mind and camarader. Community camaraderie. Indoctrination begins with the repetition of these ideas. In a book that he would soon write in exile, the young lawyer Sebastian Hafner recounts the effects of this brainwashing. If several weeks in Udeg, it was the work of camaraderie. Camaraderie annihilates the feeling of personal responsibility. That's what ideological education really was. By agreeing to take part in the game they were playing with us, we were turning ourselves automatically into, if not Nazis, at least into a
material the Nazis could use. The armored divisions of the law. Unlike Sebastian Hafner, most of these young people quite frivolously agreed to become the spearhead for most of them belong to a radical generation coming out of the universities. So swastikas and patriotic songs replaced the togas and books of legal proceedings. In this archive film, they have just symbolically condemned and hanged a representation of a paragraph symbol, a sacrilege that was both a bit of fun and heavy with meaning. In Germany, the laws are more often subdivided into paragraphs and less into articles as they do in France. So when you target the paragraph, you are targeting the way in which the laws are subdivided and therefore the formal conception of the law.
Before 1933 in Germany, we had a system of liberal law as in the whole of Europe and the west. That is where everything stems from the individual. Everything starts with the dignity of the individual, his freedoms and the protecting of his dignity and freedoms. With the Nazis, this concept was reversed and it was decided that henceforward the basis of law was no longer the individual but the community of the people. Symbolically to produce a paragraph wasn't enough to radically and durably reverse practices. It was necessary to discipline and control the legal professions.
Created by the Nazis and presided over by Hans Franc, the Academy of Law would take care of it. In 1933, Hans Franc was brought into the government as commissioner of the Reich for bringing into line both the legal establishment and judicial associations. That was the first thing. Another factor perhaps was the presidency of the academy for German law. Hans Fran would preside over this academy from 1933 to 1942. To all appearances, it was a standard law academy. Its brief was to train lawyers, support judicial publications, prepare legal bills. But all these functions of a law academy and in this case the academy for German law took on a special meaning since it required specifically bringing into line and
breathing life into a new ideology. Within the academy there were eminent law professors like Carl Schmidt, philosophers such as Martin Haidiger, future magistrates and lawyers and of course Roland Frysler. There were also people with no judicial qualifications appointed just out of political expediency, industrialists or well-known personalities. Hans Franc decided to set the example. On the ground, magistrates saw a part of their prerogatives brought into question.
Some of them openly complained. In the personal file of prosecutor Reutder, there are dozens of notes that this conservative civil servant had addressed to the government minister denouncing the interference of the state secret police, the Gestapo. In many cases, procedures, illegal interrogations, repeated irregularities for offenses of a political nature, non-transmission of information to the public prosecutor's office, and even sometimes the disappearance of proof. In concrete terms, a defendant can be transferred before a repressive penal tribunal and find him or herself at the end of the proceedings acquitted and walk out of the court. And the Gustapo might grab him saying, "Yes, all right, but we've got other things against you."
In any case, you're outside the community. In this pitilous war against the enemies of the community, the independence of judges was under threat everywhere. In the Colong Tribunal where she worked, Lilo Kuznitzki saw it every day. To reach the ideal of justice for the community of the people that they dreamed of, the Nazis had set out to defeat the judicial system. Whether it was birthright citizenship, health, heredity, or politics, special tribunals were created to sanction new offenses defined by Nazi dogma.
Every time there was a problem, they created a law and then a tribunal. So there were tribunals in every field and especially there was an interesting tribunal which concerned the handing down of hereditary farms. Because there are two German key words, blood and landlord. The German peasant was in Nazi minds the essence of national socialism. So what was important was that great property should be passed down. If someone were Jewish, he had no right to own land. If someone were enough of a congenital idiot, he had no right to own land and so on. Every possible exclusion was invented to preserve the purity of the race, so to speak. It was land tenure that brought honor to German soil.
Special tribunals, Gustapo, and the police became the instruments of this bringing into line that the Nazis called synchronization, and nothing must stop it, even if it meant getting around traditional justice. It was a vast movement that also transformed the life of executioner Johan Reichart. In June 1933, after two years in Holland, he came back and settled in Munich with his family. He had just been offered a long-term contract. It was beyond his wildest dreams. The Richarts could once again enjoy the Munich summer and swimming in the canal, a carefree happiness they had almost forgotten.
An income of 3,000 marks a month, a small fortune. All things were possible again thanks to this contract. Saxony, which had no executioner, also sought his services. Reichart lived again, and around him, the nation too seemed to be reborn. The Nazis announced a plan to boost the economy. Like many Germans, in the summer of 1933, Johan Reichart went along with the incredible succession of changes happening in every field. The press had already announced several months earlier the creation by Guring of the Gestapo. Order was the priority everywhere.
Stormtroopers paraded in every town. In 2 years, the SA expanded from 100,000 to 450,000 men. Those among them appointed as police auxiliaries, were now armed. They were an instrument which made their chief Ernst Rom, Hitler's former brother in arms, an inescapably powerful man. On July 14th, the NSDAP, the Nazi party, became the only party allowed. During the summer of 1933, Adolf Hitler and Erns Rome could enjoy their victory. After 10 years of political struggle, the seeds they had planted had at last germinated. Germany was ready to follow. And in 8 months, most Germans had
accepted without batting an eyelid dozens of laws and decrees that had already fundamentally changed the country. For the Nazis, there remained one last symbolic step to complete the redisiplining of the country. On September 21st, 1933, 9 months after the Richtag fire, began the trial of those suspected of starting the blaze. Gobel's propaganda minister saw an interesting opportunity to turn it into a media platform. The great political trial that would stand in judgment over the plotters, communists against the state system. Communist Leard. Fore! Foreign! It was a show trial. The trial was broadcast live on radio. So, it had to be a great moment, a great shop window of Nazi propaganda. Except that the
trial was held according to the rules and the defense could exercise its rights. As it happened, Dimmitro, one of the accused, using his right of defense, called two ministers to the bar as witnesses. Gerbles and Guring. During his eight months in custody, Dimmitrov had prepared his defense and had scrupulously studied the German penal code. Guring found himself in such difficulty that Dimmitro managed to make him lose his temper. Feeling himself ridiculed, during had the radio broadcast of the trial stopped. But from their enforced exile, anti-Nazi German journalists loved every minute of it.
This collage by the famous press artist John Hartfield summed up the fiasco. Only Vanderlube was found guilty while Dimmitrov and the others were acquitted. For the Nazis, not only was the Reichag fire trial a crushing defeat, it showed that the bringing to heal had not gone to plan. The old law system still stood up against their vision of the world. But Hitler and his lawyers had not said their last word. And as a reaction to the defeat they had just suffered, they would soon put in place a formidable strategy and new laws that were even more implacable.
