Lawyers without rights : the fate of Jewish lawyers in Berlin after 1933 by Simone Ladwig-WintersCall Number: KK3712 .J49 W5513 2018
ISBN: 9781641051996
Publication Date: 2018
"[This book] captures the story of the occupational bans on Jewish lawyers and jurists in Berlin, the capital city and home to 3,400 attorneys. Of those, 43 percent were of Jewish origin, the largest group of any city in Germany in 1933. This story was first told in German two decades ago and updated in 2007. The book includes 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. The release coincides with the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, where on Nov. 9-10, 1938, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, also called the "Night of Broken Glass, " some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. By then, German law had eliminated all but a few dozen Jewish legal 'consultants' from the profession. As this book indicates, hundreds subsequently died in concentration camps or committed suicide; others fled the Nazi regime emigrating across the world, including more than 200 of them who eventually lived in the United States. A few, like Berlin lawyer Hanna Katz, a pioneer in the practice of law by women in Germany and whose career is detailed in this book, even earned U.S. law degrees. Katz, for one, lived in New York and later became a member of the American Bar Association. This release includes three significant additions--forewords from the Honorable Stephen G. Breyer, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and one of three sitting Jewish justices; Benjamin B. Ferencz, 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 support for this book. With minor exceptions, the second edition of Simone Ladwig-Winters' book has been presented in its entirety, including prefaces from the Berlin bar, the author's insights into her research, notes and abbreviations."-- Provided by the publisher.