The biography of an Austrian specialist in Roman law, Paul Koschaker (1879–1951), who spent the Nazi-time as an elderly professor at important law faculties of Germany, such as Leipzig, Berlin and Tubingen, is reexamined. Recent attempts of image cultivation, which try to acclaim Koschaker the most courageous fighter against every form of totalitarianism in Europe and nearly the patron saint for European jurists, are proved unjustified.
Based on a recent biography of Franz Wieacker (1908–1994) two central questions are examined. Is it allowed to analyze a young, but already prominent German law professor of the Nazi era as a pure scholar whose identity remained unchanged from the times of Weimar to the Federal Republic of Germany? Is it plausible to treat the Nazis as progenitors of current European legal history, and in particular as founding fathers of European legal tradition?
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