How the Nazis Did It

In the appendix to the book The Lion of Munster, we find a document not written by that Lion (Ven. Cdl. Von Galen) but by someone else,  The book's author, Fr. Daniel Utrecht, gives us a brief history of the legal theory leading to the Nazi State and the consequences.  The document is titled Rechtsbewusstsein und Rechtsunsicherheit, and it is available at the Munster public library among other places.

From the book:

"Beginning with a reference to Pp. Pius XII's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which it characterizes as 'perhaps the sharpest attack on National Socialism and the best refutation of its theories,' the document cites the Pope's stress on the principle that justice is the foundation of states......[in Latin] Justitia Fundamentorum Regnum, noting that the Pope was calling attention to its corollary:  States that ignore this principle, by undermining their own foundations, are setting themselves up for their own collapse.

"National Socialism, it goes on to say, did just this.  It cited the concept 'Right and Justice' ...(Recht und Gerechtigkeit) but it deliberately created uncertainty or insecurity about the law in the people.  This Rechtsunsicherheit, the document [says] 'belongs to the methods by which authoritarian States rule'--namely, through terror.  ...[Post WWI] ...all the authoritarian States....put fear into the hearts of citizens by establishing order in society through violence.

"Before [WWI], such methods had been rare in European countries.  [The Czarist state used those methods but European states did not--their legal principles were opposed to that]....European citizens had a sense of security of their lives and property under the law [which] fostered a peaceful public order, which in turn made possible the economic growth of the 19th Century.  But there was a fundamental flaw in legal theory--a refusal to admit a metaphysical foundation to law:  [citing the document]

The 19th century wanted to give value only to positive law, but not to natural law.  If the head of State or a law-making body, or the People is the sole source of law, and if only the positive law has value, then it must be the case that the State or the head of State or the People can arbitrarily change this system of law on which the order in Europe rested.  The legal theorists were firmly convinced that justice (or right) would remain....that a shaking of the fundamental rights of the person was out of the question.  Important law professors [throughout] Europe spoke as ever about the value and  majesty of justice, but refused just as energetically to acknowledge any metaphysical grounding of justice....Napoleon I .....remarked that the authentic and final meaning of the French Revolution  consisted in the equality of all under the law.....But why....every human being has these rights was of no interest to legal positivists.

"The author of Rechtsbewusstsein und Rechtsunsicherheit saw Adolf Hitler as drawing the logical consequences from this state of legal theory.  ........Law and justice are under the power of the State.  Might goes before Right.  ....So for National Socialism, since the Fuhrer 'was the sole representative of the people, and the people the sole source of rights, the Fuhrer.....did not need to bow to the demands of justice, but was above justice.'

"Having set forth the thinking that led Hitler to conclude that might comes before right, the author.....then detailed the ways in which the [Nazi] regime undermined the order of justice in Germany and eroded the sense of security under the law in the German people.  By punishing political opponents for their beliefs, by undermining the fundamental rights of the individual, by creating a police power that was not answerable to the ordinary functioning of the judicial system, by creating a system of concentration camps, by inventing new and undefined legal concepts such as 'the will of the people,' by punishing not only the regime's enemies but also their families, by declaring entire groups of people--indeed, an entire race--as criminal, and in many other ways, the Nazis undermined the the morale of the people.  There was no security about the law but only the anxiety of being under an arbitrary power."

We cannot emphasize enough the Founders' mention of the 'laws of Nature and Nature's God' given the history and logic used by the Nazis to establish their regime--and, we must add, the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, and many of their contemporaries and clients.

Why do we harp on the Laws of Nature and Nature's God?

Because they are superior to Positive Law and must always remain so, or this country, like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, will set itself up for collapse, just as Pius XII foretold in his encyclical.

Let that sink in as Biden* "otherizes" the non-vaxxed, allows the FBI to function without answering to the ordinary functioning of the judicial system, captures political prisoners (such as those rotting in D.C. jails following 1/6), and--through captive/servant intermediaries such as Facebook and Twitter--punishes political enemies, and through new and vaguely-defined legal theories such as "Critical Race Theory," undermines or criminalizes persons for merely existing.

It's either the Laws of Nature's God or............