Dreams Born and Shattered 387In Nazi Germany, the position was diff erent. Here, more attention was
given to international law (although not by Adolf Hitler, who despised law-
yers). Th ere were two principal features of international law, one of them
new and the other not. Th e one that was not new was the deployment of
international- law arguments to attack the validity of the Versailles peace
settlement. Th is had been a theme of German activity since 1919. Th is attack
had been mounted from both the po liti cal right (e.g., by Kaufmann) and left
(e.g., by Schücking, who had a pacifi st background). It is notable that natural-
law ideas played a part in this eff ort, in the form of an assertion that the Ver-
sailles regime should be regarded as invalid to the extent that it transgressed
fundamental principles of law, such as the equality of states.
Th e new approach off ered by the Nazis was a racist perspective on inter-
national law. Even this, though, was less a complete innovation than a
perversion of the ideas of the historical school and the nationality school of
the nineteenth century. Nazism had an affi nity with the historical school in
its conception of the nation as a Vo l k s t a a t rather than as a Rechtsstaat—
that is, in its stress on the primordial and spontaneous relations of peoples,
instead of on formal state structures, as the foundation of po liti cal life. In
the Nazi view, the will of the nation emanates, in a quasi- mystical fashion,
upward from the consciousness of the people. It is not handed downward
by the will of a sovereign. Th is much was compatible with the general out-
look of the historical school. Th e principal Nazi innovation was to hold that
this collective will or consciousness is not national in character, as it had
been for Mancini and Mazzini, but instead is racial. Moreover, there was
no trace in Nazi thought of the broad- minded, tolerant cosmopolitanism of
Mazzini, which would hold all the races of the world to be equal in their
diverse contributions to the great cause of humanity at large. To the Nazis,
races were ranked hierarchically, with the Aryans generously accorded the
top position.
Th e founding writer of the racist school of international law was Helmut
Nicolai, in a book ominously entitled Die Rassengesetzliche Rechtslehre (Le-
gal Doctrine Based on the Law of Race), published in 1932. It asserted that
the Vo l k is “the primary, meaningful unit of mankind.” In line with his-
torical school thought, Nicolai expressed hostility to what he regarded as ar-
tifi cial law promulgated by state authorities, preferring the law that emerged
spontaneously from the life of the people.