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sense. By building on these, it was possible to oppose even such
monstrous legal experts as Ronald Freisler (German legal scholar,
first lawyer, then Secretary of State for Justice, then President of
the People’s Court between 1942 and 1945, an ardent supporter of
laws for the oppression of ethnic minorities or “Rassenschande’”,
and who personally imposed more than two and a half thousand
death sentences) even if doing so was not permitted by statutory
law. Incidentally, this figure passed the judgment in the Scholl
brothers’ case, as well as in the trial after Stauffenberg’s failed
assassination attempt. Although Freisler did not survive the war
(he was killed by a falling beam during the bombings), he is an
example of the type of person of whom many, including formerly
senior legal officials such as judges, were held accountable for their
judicial actions during the Third Reich in 1947. The trial, which
lasted ten months, had four charges, the most important of which
was the third: “Crimes against humanity” (Verbrechen gegen die
Menschlichkeit). Lawyers for the defense have consistently argued
that their defendants were, on the one hand, only enforcing the
law, that the statutory law they applied were passed in accordance
with the rules of the time, and that one judicial official has no
right to question, much less overwrite them. Radbruch’s theory
does not support this defense, no more than it does the “I was
following orders” defense. That is, in such an extreme situation,
it is clear that statutory, written law conflicts with unwritten law,
which is a set of natural laws based on morality, higher principles,
and common sense. It follows, therefore, that the moral norm
is more fundamental, or, if you prefer, higher than something
we might perceive as a simple system of rules, behind which the
sovereign either stands or, occasionally, slumbers. Natural law
is a more important basis for justice, especially when there is no
statutory legal norm against “legalized illegality” (as exemplified
by the trial of judges who strictly adhered to Nazi law), or when a
general norm needs to be established (be it by a constitution or for
example the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) that does not
follow directly from a specific legal norm. In other words, as good