Justice among Nations. A History of International Law - Stephen C. Neff

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Dreams Born and Shattered 389

their full destiny as a superior Vo l k. Th is line of thought culminated in
ideas of “vital space” (spazio vitale) in Italy and Lebensraum (“living space”)
in Germany. Neither the German nor the Italian government, however,
was in any great need of learned lawyers to justify their aggressive foreign
policies.
One of the more immediate, and down- to- earth, tasks of the Nazis aft er
taking power was to purge international-law writers whose opinions were
incompatible with those of the new order. Th ey were a distinguished group.
An early, and prominent, victim was Kelsen at the University of Cologne,
who was on the fi rst list of university professors to be dismissed. According
to Walz, the Vienna School ideas had been “thought up by some Jewish
brain.” Kelsen went to Geneva, where he taught for the next seven years,
and then, in 1940, to the United States. Aft er several years at Harvard Law
School, he moved to Berkeley’s Department of Po liti cal Science and taught
there for the remainder of his career.
Kelsen was only the fi rst victim of many. Wolfgang Friedmann was dis-
missed from his post as a judge in a labor court. He made his way to Britain
in 1934, took British nationality, and became a barrister and law teacher. He
later lived in both Canada and Australia (where he produced the fi rst com-
prehensive treatise on Australian administrative law), and then subsequently
moved on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia Law School.
Kaufmann, who had a Jewish background, was removed from his academic
posts, although he continued to write (always in French during this period).
He left Germany in 1939, fi rst to the Netherlands and then to Britain. Gus-
tav Radbruch, a prominent legal phi los o pher, also went to Britain. Hans
Morgenthau, an eminent lawyer and po liti cal scientist (who was Jewish),
went initially to Britain and later to the United States. Strupp, also of Jewish
ancestry, fl ed fi rst to Turkey and then to France. He was there in 1940, when
he received a welcome job off er from Columbia University in New York, but
he died of a heart attack before he could take it up. Schücking, on the
bench of the World Court, was fortunately outside the Nazi reach (he died
in 1935). But he was removed from his position of director of the Institute for
International Law in Kiel (which is now named aft er him). He was also dis-
missed from the editorship of the Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht (a nd replaced
by Walz). On the whole, in international law, as in so many fi elds, the
Nazi policies provided great intellectual enrichment to the countries that

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