Politics, law, and miscarriages of justice: The criminal defense lawyer Max Hirschberg in the Weimar Republic (Germany)

This dissertation explores the problems of miscarriages of justice through the cases of Max Hirschberg (1883--1964)---the leading criminal defense lawyer in Munich during the Weimar Republic (1919--1933). Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis, and he also fought to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants. This dissertation uses Hirschberg's cases to probe political justice in pre-Nazi Germany, to conceptualize the causes of miscarriages of justice in ordinary criminal cases, and to explore the relationship between political and nonpolitical justice.; Soon after World War I, Hirschberg began judicial battles against the Weimar Republic's anti-democratic opponents. In 1922, he defended the young Social Democrat Felix Fechenbach against treason charges in a seminal political trial, which contemporaries dubbed a German "Dreyfus Affair." In 1925, Hirschberg turned a libel lawsuit (of the nationalist editor Paul Nikolaus Cossmann) into a comprehensive attack on the right-wing's "Stab-in-the-Back" legend (blaming Social Democrats for Germany's defeat in World War I). In 1929, he crossed swords with Hitler himself in a case linking Hitler's disregard for the German population in Italian-controlled South Tyrol to his seeking Mussolini's financing for the Nazi Party. In his final political trial in 1932, Hirschberg tried to show that powerful Nazis had plotted to murder their fellow Nazi, the S.A. chief Ernst Roehm. In the mid-1920's, Hirschberg also began unearthing cases of innocent convicts, fought to reverse their convictions, and published a series of scholarly articles on the causes of miscarriages of justice in ordinary criminal cases.; Hirschberg's legal fights against both the unjust prosecution of political defendants and the unjust convictions of ordinary defendants arose from his determination to confront all kinds of injustice with both political resolve and scholarly neutrality. He realized that even political justice adhered to some procedural regularity, and that nonpolitical miscarriages of justice often hid a political undercurrent. In all his cases, he strove for a common goal: the triumph of the liberal rule of law, even in a legal system chained down by reaction.