Empire With the exception of its jurisdiction in matters of treason, the was purely an appellate court during the era of the
German Empire. Its task was to ensure uniformity of jurisprudence throughout the territory of the German Empire. A national civil code (the ) went only into effect on 1 January 1900, and the civil law systems of the individual states were not harmonised with one another until this time. The
General State Laws for the Prussian States, for the
Rhineland,
Baden,
Saxony and uncodified common law all applied side by side. Critics saw the as a continuation of the
Prussian High Tribunal. The judiciary was characterised by monarchical conservatism. Particularly in the area of criminal law, critical voices were in the minority at the court during the Empire, as they were in other state institutions at the time. In 1912, for example, the court ruled that the publication by the
Social Democratic Party (SPD) of a brochure that was aimed at civil servants and called on them to vote for the SPD was offensive. In its verdict of 12 October 1907 in the high treason trial against
Karl Liebknecht, the stated that the unconditional obedience of soldiers to the emperor was a central provision of the
Constitution of the German Empire. Liebknecht had argued that imperial orders were null and void if they were intended to violate the constitution. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for acts preliminary to high treason.
Weimar Republic In the
Weimar Republic, the court continued in its conservative path, especially in the area of criminal law. In the judgments it handed down on 21 December 1921 in the trial of three participants in the right-wing
Kapp Putsch, there was only one conviction – , the interior minister under the putsch government, who was sentenced to the minimum penalty of five years' imprisonment. The criminal proceedings against two co-defendants were dropped because, according to the court, they had not played a leading role in the coup attempt. None of the leaders of the putsch was ever brought to trial. In the 1921
Leipzig war crimes trials which took place before the , only a few German war criminals were punished. Many cases were dropped, and of the few convictions, the verdicts against two members of the navy for sinking an
English hospital ship were later secretly overturned. On 23 November 1931,
Carl von Ossietzky was sentenced to 18 months in prison for espionage in the
Weltbühne trial because an article published in
his magazine had revealed the secret and illegal rearmament of the . Since violence from the right was not countered as forcefully as that from the left – some verdicts in the trials of the right-wing
Feme murders in particular justified the accusation – the trial and others like it contributed to the view that the judiciary during the Weimar Republic was "blind in its right eye". The made some groundbreaking decisions in the field of civil law during the period. Revaluation case law, for example, which developed under the impact of
German hyperinflation and the
Great Depression, was nothing short of revolutionary. The for the first time granted itself the authority to examine laws for their validity, which led to the previously recognised mark-for-mark principle (par value principle) being abandoned due to the extremely high rate of inflation.
Nazi era After
Adolf Hitler came to power, the Law on Admission to the Bar forced Jewish and Social Democratic judges (including Senate President and justice ) to resign, and Jewish lawyers at the were prevented from continuing their work. In the period that followed, the did not oppose the Nazi takeover or the regime's numerous illegal acts. Instead it became deeply entangled in the
National Socialist justice system, for example when it sentenced the Dutch communist
Marinus van der Lubbe to death on the basis of the retroactively applied
Law on Imposition and Enforcement of the Death Penalty in the
Reichstag fire trial. The acquittal of the other four defendants was one of the reasons why the was stripped of its jurisdiction in matters of treason in 1934 by the law that established the
People's Court. Germany's
annexation of Austria in 1938 led to the dissolution of the
Supreme Court of Justice in Vienna and the transfer of its jurisdiction to the . When the measure was implemented on 1 April 1939, the became the supreme court of appeal for Austrian civil cases. Although partial reforms were made to Austrian
substantive law, the Austrian
General Civil Code remained the applicable private law code in Austria. Meanwhile, the 8th Civil Senate was established at the , to which all legal matters concerning Austria, the
Sudeten German territories and the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were assigned whenever the jurisdiction of the first five senates was not applicable. It was dissolved due to understaffing before the was abolished.
Racial Laws In civil law, the handed down decisions – for example on marriage and contract law – that affected the status of Jews under the National Socialist government. In 1935, the wrote: In 1935, in a further development of the law, the recognised even before the
Nuremberg Laws were passed that if a marriage partner was Jewish, it was grounds for annulling the marriage, although a formal legal basis for such terminations was not created until the Marriage Act enacted in 1938. On the interpretation or reinterpretation of contracts with Jews, it ruled that "the National Socialist worldview requires that only those of German origin (and those legally equal to them) be treated as legally valid in the German Reich". With the ruling, the adopted the racist subversion of the private law system that was developed by the German legal scholarship of the time, especially by the (). One of its most important representatives, the legal philosopher
Karl Larenz, wrote in 1935, just a few months before the judgment was handed down: "A person is only a legal comrade if he is a national comrade; a national comrade is a person of German blood. Those outside the national community are not within the law." == End of the
Reichsgericht ==