Yom Hashoah

April 20 was Hitler's birthday and the tenth anniversary of Columbine. If you recall, there was a reason for the calendar madness. Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It didn't exist when I was a child, when the first accounts of what happened in Germany were making their way into novels by Leon Uris and Meyer Levin, when The Diary of Ann Frank was compulsory reading for any Jewish girl, whether observant or not.

A day of remembrance. I attended a lecture given by the son of one of Germany's most renowned legal ethicists, Max Friedlander. His son, Gerhardt Friedlander is a nuclear chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project, at over 90 years of age although frail, still has a riveting mind and a clear voice. He read from his father's memoir, which he translated from German. His father's work on legal ethics had been plagiarized by the man who would later become a chief judge of the courts that presided over bar admissions and practice. And the man who presided had stolen the work of his father! Gerhardt later told the story that when he was attending UC Berkeley, he received a letter from his father who was still living in Germany, although by then not allowed to practice law under the Nazis. The Germans had issued another suffocating law, this time that all Jews had to include the name "Israel" as their middle names. "My father wrote to me and told me to take my passport and have it amended. Even under the Nazis, my father believed in obeying the law."

Of course, Gerhardt did not.

The other speaker was Douglas Morris, a Holocaust scholar whose expertise is in Nazis and the legal profession. He told the story of Max Hirschberg, who coincidentally had been an apprentice in the law offices of Max Friedlander. Max Hirschberg was the most renowned criminal defense attorney in Munich when the Nazis came to power. Their first act against the Jews in 1933 was to prohibit Jewish lawyers from practicing law. However, this first act had exceptions: if the attorney had been admitted since before 1914, had served in the German army during World War I, or whose father or son had served in World War I. Professor Morris explained that in the beginning, the German attorneys and judges continued to apply the law to the facts in a forthright way, and since Hirschberg had been admitted to the bar before 1914 and was himself a WWI veteran, he was not disbarred. That intellectual honesty didn't last long, because the next exclusions, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, had no such exceptions.

When I got back to the office, I learned with relief that President Obama had not excluded the possibility of prosecuting the architects of the "war on terror" whose distortion of legal analysis and legal reasoning produced the Office of Legal Counsel memos that authorized the use of torture on detainees in the "war on terror."