Hitler's Judges: Ideological Commitment and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany

Wayne Geerling, Gary Magee, Vinod Mishra and Russell Smyth

No 10-16, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: To what extent do judges in courts in authoritarian regimes merely implement the will of the state? What determines judges’ behaviour in such contexts? We address these questions by examining the role of judicial policy preferences in influencing whether judges in Nazi Germany sentenced defendants charged with serious political offences - treason and high treason - to death. Our findings lend support to the attitudinal model of judicial decision-making. Specifically, we find that judicial policy preferences, measured by the depth of the ideological commitment of the judge to the Nazi Party worldview, were an important determinant of whether judges imposed the death sentence. We also find that judges who were more ideologically committed to the Nazi Party were more likely to impose the death sentence on those who belonged to the most organised political opposition groups to the Nazi state, those whose acts of treason or high treason involved violent resistance against the state, and those with characteristics to which Nazism was intolerant.

Pages: 86 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018 ... mageemishrasmyth.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Hitler's Judges: Ideological Commitment and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mos:moswps:2016-10

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.e ... esearch/publications

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simon Angus ().