The Making of a ‘58er 47
the workplace and the socialization of industry. Abendroth had been
imprisoned by the Nazis throughout the Third Reich and had been
elected to the governing body of the newly established Association
for the Professors of Constitutional Law as a symbolic gesture of
reparation (Wiedergutmachung).^89
Of the hundred professors who had been members of the law
professors’ professional association during the Third Reich, only
four were excluded from rejoining at its refounding in 1949.^90 The
“coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of the jurists had begun on April 1,
1933, when the state ministries of justice suspended all Jewish
judges, prosecutors, and district attorneys. Karl Linz, the chair-
man of the German Federation of Judges, trusted Hitler’s assur-
ances that the independence of the judiciary would be maintained.
In the same year, the Nazis purged the law schools of about a third
of their professors, making room for a new generation of profes-
sors who would retain their posts well into the 1960s. Nearly half
the university professors who found positions after the war owed
their careers to the Nazis. Only 17 percent of the full professors
who were dismissed by the Nazis returned to their posts. Hans-Carl
Nipperdey, Ulrich Scheuner, Hans-Peter Ipsen, and all the others
who had participated in shaping the National Socialist legal system
returned to their chairs and continued to dominate German legal
thinking in the 1950s, just as they had in the 1930s and 1940s. Their
commentaries on laws continued to appear, as if nothing had hap-
pened, in new editions prepared by the old authors.^91
Other works from the Nazi period were confined in separate
sections of libraries, known as “poison lockers,” and kept out of
sight.^92 The legal field was a complete failure at mastering its own
past. This permitted the Schmittians to retain their prominent
place in the academic and public discussion of matters pertaining
(^89) Manfred Walther, “Die Positivismus-These als Selbstanklage? Hat der
juristische Positivismus die deutschen Juristen wehrlos gemacht?” Kritische
Justiz 21 (1988), 323–54.
(^90) In addition to Schmitt, Reinhard Höhn (1904–2000), Ernst-Rudolf Huber
(1903–90), and Otto Koellreutter (1883–1972) were barred. See Michael
Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland. Vol. 3: Staats-
und-Verwaltungsrechtswissenschaft in Republik und Diktatur, 1914–1945
(München: C.H. Beck, 1999 ).
(^91) Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 ; orig. 1987), 237.
(^92) Bernhard Schlink, “Why Carl Schmitt?” in Constellations 2–3 ( 1996 ), 435.