Nazi Germany is often misunderstood as an arbitrary, lawless regime. But even as the rule of law gradually was hollowed out, significant structures of the legal system continued to exist. National-conservative lawyers and judges contributed in various legal and extra-legal ways to the establishment of a terrorist dictatorship – especially by legally codifying the radical otherness of the “racially inferior.”

A recent Museum program about the rule of law before and during the Third Reich was led by Thorsten Wagner and Eric Muller of FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) – an organization that looks at how institutional leaders became intimately involved in designing, enabling and/or executing the crimes of Nazi Germany.

Watch the program below.