Veit Harlan (1899–1964), director of the anti-Semitic period film Jud Süß(Germany, 1940), was classified as unbelastet, “untarnished” by the past, in denazification proceedings in Hamburg in 1947. There was an outcry against the decision, and in 1948 two organizations of victims of Nazism filed an application with the chief public prosecutor of Hamburg to press charges against Harlan on the basis of Allied Control Council Law No. 10 (“crimes against humanity”). The public prosecutor’s office of the Hamburg Regional Court investigated Harlan and charged him with “having contributed as an accessory to the commission of crimes against humanity by means of persecution based on race, and having been associated with the planning of such crimes.”[1] In the trial, which opened in Hamburg on March 3, 1949, victims of the National Socialist policy of persecution and extermination also appeared as witnesses, including Norbert Wollheim, who testified to the effect of the anti-Semitic propaganda film. Concoctions such as Jud Süßhad spread fear and terror among the persecuted Jews of Nazi Germany, he stated. In the perception of the persecuted Jews, the image of Jews sketched in the film could only fuel hatred and violence among the non-Jewish German population.

The trial ended in Harlan’s acquittal on April 23, 1949. The law enforcement agency appealed, and the High Court of the British Zone (precursor of the German Federal Supreme Court) decided on December 12, 1949, to hear the appeal. On appeal, the prosecution again had no success. The jury court, once more chaired by Landgerichtsrat (regional court judge) Walter Tyrolf, a former Nazi lawyer, again pronounced Harlan free of all criminal liability in a decision rendered on April 29, 1950.

Wollheim, who in the original trial “had made declarations, as a representative of the Jews of Germany who by chance had been saved from the extermination measures of the National Socialist regime, about the life of the Jewish group in the so-called Third Reich” and had spoken about the “meaning of the film Jud Süß for the Jewish community, which at this time was threatened by daily persecutions”[2] (Wollheim, in his letter of March 30, 1950, to the public prosecutor’s office of the Hamburg Regional Court), published a bitter denunciation of the successor state of the Third Reich and its “post-National Socialist justice” following his return from a trip to Israel in mid-1949. The Hamburg judges who acquitted Harlan had, in Wollheim’s opinion, “in the end degraded the process of cleansing post-Hitler Germany of its criminals who were responsible for its catastrophe […] to a political conjuring trick.”[3]

Wollheim detected a profound “crisis of confidence regarding the new German system of justice” and summarized the situation resignedly: “Having the courts in this country pass judgment on crimes against humanity has turned out to be, to put it mildly, one of the great mistaken ideas of the occupying powers.”[4] Wollheim drew the logical conclusion and refused to appear again as a witness in the second Harlan trial. All too soon, his apprehension and doubts were confirmed. As mentioned above, Harlan left the courtroom a free man in April 1950.

In his newspaper article, Wollheim made a striking “demand”: He wanted an “international panel of judges created” by one of the occupying powers in the western zones “to concern itself with the overall practice of sentencing in the field of the trials for crimes against humanity.” Wollheim emphasized the reasons for his desire: “We few survivors demand this scrutiny on behalf of those who have been defiled and murdered, who have been mocked and insulted again by courts not free of the spirit of Nazism. Convoking such a panel means erecting barriers to the present-day torrent of neo-Nazism, which is preparing to flow back into its old bed with elemental violence.”[5] The outcome of the Harlan trial was one of the crucial factors in Wollheim’s decision to leave Germany.

(WR; transl. KL)

Literature

Liebert, Frank: “Vom Karrierestreben zum ‘Nötigungsnotstand.’ Jud Süß, Veit Harlan und die westdeutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft (1945–50).” In: Thomas Henne / Arne Riedlinger, eds.: Das Lüth-Urteil aus (rechts‑)historischer Sicht. Die Konflikte um Veit Harlan und die Grundrechtsjudikatur des Bundesverfassungsgerichts. Berlin: BWV, 2005, pp. 111–146.

Pardo, Herbert / Schiffner, Siegfried: Jud Süss. Historisches und juristisches Material zum Fall Veit Harlan. In cooperation with Hendrik G. van Dam and Norbert Wollheim. Hamburg: Auerdruck, 1949.