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Business as Usual: The Germans and Their Law, 1943 to 1948

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Business as Usual

The Germans and Their Law, 1943 to 1948

Benjamin Lahusen

Translated from the German

328 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-626-6 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (August 2026)

eISBN 978-1-83695-629-7 eBook Not Yet Published


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Description

Drawing on extensive archival records, Business as Usual shows how the legal system in Germany continued to operate with the same personnel, administrative routines, and institutional habits between 1943 and 1948, despite violence, mass murder, bombings, and regime change. This strict adherence to legal formalism acted as a “normalization machine” for mass atrocities, facilitating the compromised but seamless transition into the post-war administration. By tracing everyday judicial work in extraordinary circumstances, it reveals how legal institutions endure, adapt, and serve an inestimable purpose even in moments of profound upheaval. Moreover, only within the framework of the normal, ordinary law could the ideological exception of Nazi law unfold. In other words: besides the banality of evil, there is also evilness in banality.

Benjamin Lahusen studied law at the Universities of Tübingen, Lausanne (Switzerland), Berlin (Humboldt) and New York (Columbia), and was a doctoral candidate at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt/Main. From 2015 to 2020 he was a Junior Research Group Leader at Humboldt University in Berlin, in 2021 Habilitation, and from 2020 to 2023 was Managing Director of the Advisory Commission on Nazi-looted Art. Since 2021 he has been Professor for Private Law and Modern Legal History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, and in 2024 became Dean of the Law Faculty.

Subject: History: 20th Century to PresentPeace and Conflict StudiesHistory: World War II
Area: Germany


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