388 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )Nicolai fell out of offi cial favor in 1935 (for reasons unrelated to his legal
opinions), but there were others to take his place. Norbert Gürke was one.
He was originally Austrian but had been compelled to fl ee to Germany be-
cause of his Nazi views. He has been described as the author of one of “the
crassest expressions of National Socialism,” a book on the infl uence of Jew-
ish writers on international law. More substantively, he gave the racial
theory of international law its defi nitive legal exposition in 1935 in a book
entitled Volk und Völkerrecht (Race and International Law). Another prom-
inent Nazi writer was Gustav Adolf Walz. Walz even received a degree of
international respectability by being invited to lecture at Th e Hague Acad-
emy in 1937— not, however, on Nazi theories of law but on the far more ano-
dyne topic of the relation between national and international law.
Th e Nazi writers did not maintain that the various racial groups were
international persons in the legal sense. Th ey did posit, though, that racial
characteristics provided the key to a deeper understanding of present—
and future— political and legal relationships. Gürke, for example, con-
tended that the racial foundations of societies led to the formation of spe-
cifi c state forms and ultimately to specifi c expressions of international law.
Jews and Bolsheviks, he concluded, must be seen as altogether outside the
international legal order. In this regard, Nazi writers had certain affi ni-
ties with solidarist or so cio log i cal writers, in their insistence that interna-
tional law does not have an in de pen dent existence of its own, but instead is
a product of other forces. Th ere was a stress on the dynamic and ever-
changing character of international society, also a feature of solidarism.
International law, it was insisted, must refl ect these changes. As such, it
must be closely tied to the facts and situations confronting it. Th is atti-
tude led Nazi writers to be strongly hostile to the Vienna School, with its
abstract and normative character, so far removed from the visceral emo-
tions of the common folk. (Kelsen became an early target of the Nazis
when they took power.)
In both Italian fascism and German Nazism, there was a pronounced
militaristic strain. In terms of legal thought, it took the somewhat vague
form of an entitlement of peoples to resources. If a nation was to be truly
self- suffi cient, as the Italian fascist government dreamed, then it naturally
had to have a suffi cient resource base at its disposal. In broadly similar
terms, Germans were held to be entitled to suffi cient territory to live out