The linked article in question is an artifact of its time (1957) and represents a view of the German judiciary that is very much outdated in light of current historiography on the legal profession in the Third Reich.

The dominant defense during the postwar period on the role of the judiciary in the dictatorship was one of principled defense of legal norms blinkered by a too narrow commitment by German jurists to legal positivism (in simplified layman's terms, a law is a law). One of the foremost advocates of this position was the Social Democratic legal scholar and Reichs Minister of Justice in Weimar, Gustav Radbruch. In an influential 1946 article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Radbruch argued that the German legal profession had been caught in a bind in that to resist the regime, they had to break the law or not enforce it. This was a trap in that precluded open resistance and forced principled legal professionals to resist through subversion. While Radbruch was not an defender of all jurists' actions during the Third Reich, his argument became very important in the early years of the FRG. Some within the occupation regime and some German emigres like Ernst Fraenkel called for a denazification of the bar and judiciary, and while the occupation governments gradually walked away from denazification, the danger was there. The German legal profession as a whole developed an exculpatory narrative much like that of Radbruch and this counterattack was successful. Most of the legal profession active in the Adenauer years were veterans of the Third Reich's courts, the most infamous being Hans Globke, who not only drafted the Nuremberg Laws, but was the Chancellor's right-hand man.

Cracks in this edifice of limited responsibility and resistance appeared in the 1970s, but legal historians of the 1980s had demolished much of this self-serving narrative of the German legal profession. Ingo Müller's 1987 book Furchtbare Juristen: Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit unserer Justiz (Terrible Jurists: the Unmastered Past of our Justices- known in the Anglophone translation as the more innocuous Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich) launched a series of critical reexaminations of la under the Third Reich and the compromised judiciary. In Germany, some of this reevaluation ranged from the polemical to more measured reevaluation. This reevaluation also intersected with the intentionalist vs functionalist debate ongoing in German academia, especially as it cut to the heart of how the Third Reich operated on a daily basis.

Pace defenders of the legal profession like Hans Peter Graver, the dominant interpretation of the law under National Socialism was that it was a willing instrument of Nazi terror. One of the opening acts of the Machtergreifung was to purge judges and state jurists who were Jews or politically suspect. While apologists in the postwar period would use these purges as evidence of Nazi terror and contempt for the law, the bulk of the legal profession did continue at their jobs. Instead of positivist thinking dominating their interpretation of the law, National Socialist ideology crept into legal interpretations. The German legal profession as a whole was quite vulnerable to this process as there were long-standing conservative and authoritarian strains within German law. Radbruch, for example, argued in a 1911 article that hereditary inferiority made some types of criminals innately incorrigible. The German judiciary had been independent from direct political control both during the Kaiserreich and Weimar, but it also had streak of social policing and punitive punishment. The Weimar jurists in particular had a minor obsession with incorrigible and degenerates, and issues like the legality of sterilization gained traction within Weimar courts.

The Machtergreifung ushered in a process of radicalization of the courts and the legal profession. The state greatly expanded the role and power of prosecutors and the judges' sentencing powers. Judges and prosecutors increasingly accepted torture as a viable means of gaining evidence or a confession and collaborated with the growing SS internal state. National Socialist legal discourse, as led by its chief legal brain Hans Frank, argued that law needed to serve and be an expression of the Volksgemeinschaft. While some of the extreme views of the NSDAP found little room within the legal profession, many of the preexisting biases and precepts of German jurists were strengthened.

Such resistance in the post-Machtergreifung legal system to Hitler was less on principles, and had much more to do with defending institutional prerogatives. Hitler famously had little love for lawyers and the NSDAP had made a biased legal system one of its political strawmen in its run-up to power. More often than not, friction between the state and the law was over the state's impatience with the slowness of legal procedures. The initial waves of arrests and arbitrary detentions between 1933-1934 short-circuited preexisting legal systems for detentions and created administrative chaos. For its part, the legal profession demanded a degree of professionalism and an end to ad hoc law enforcement. For example, complaints about the excessive and arbitrary use of torture led the jurist William Crohne to meet with officials in the Reichs Ministry of Justice to standardize the use and procedure for torture of suspects. For jurists operating under the shadow of the Third Reich argued this was a victory for the rule of law. Globke would defend his drafting of the Nuremberg Laws postwar as a defense of legal principles reasoning that if he did not do so, then other, more radical voices would have created an even more harsh set of codes. Little of this legal resistance was on the behest of the victims of Nazi policies. None of the investigations of German prisons for torture ever went to trial, despite torture and various other sadistic polices being the norm. Debates over punitive policies was over whether it applied to certain Germans, not over the overall legality of excessive legal punishment.

Although the state played with removing the existing German civil and criminal code with one of its own, the legal system of the Third Reich continued to function up through the final collapse. What emerged in the dictatorship was a two-track form of law in which normal evidentiary procedure and the rule of law applied to Aryans and one in which the law was bent to punish out-groups. While Jews were the most prominent example of an out-group in the Third Reich, but outsider was a group with hazy boundaries and always in danger of expanding. The danger that the state could turn its extensive police powers on Aryans was behind one of the more curious incidents of the war. After his personal procurer of booty Karl Lasch had been detained by the SS and died in custody, Hans Frank launched a 1942 lecture tour of German universities and law schools decrying the growth of the SS. According to Frank, there was a real danger that unless measures were taken to resist Himmler's growing state within a state, Germans would find themselves living in a police state.

Frank's lecture tour was of course hypocritical, but it provides a good window into the mentality of the German legal profession under the Third Reich. Much of the German legal profession by 1942 had been thoroughly Nazified and the tenets of National Socialism meshed well with existing conservative precepts common in the profession. For these people, legal rights and other dignities were the natural rights of Aryans who had not betrayed the Volksgemeinschaft. The arbitrary powers of the National Socialist state were not supposed to be directed against the Volk in this formulation. Lasch's arrest and death was a transgression of what a not insignificant number of Germans saw as the social compact they made with the dictatorship.

Frank would use his tour and defense of the rule of law as evidence in his defense during the Nuremberg Tribunal. His mentality was far from atypical in the German legal profession. The law only applied to Aryans and those the Third Reich saw fit to include in this privileged order. Frank's testimony was a self-serving and rather pathetic defense of an legal order predicated upon terror and arbitrariness, but he was not alone in the postwar period. Many jurists would spin their defense of Aryan rights as resistance, when in reality they were just defending the legal rights of a certain aspect of the population to the exclusion of others. When the state proved indifferent to the pleas for the primacy of law, bitterness and disillusionment set in among the legal profession. Frank's wartime and postwar defense of the rule of law though was all too typical though for the enablers of illiberal legal policies: police states do not become police states until state power turns its attentions on the privileged.

Sources

Housden, Martyn. Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Steinweis, Alan E., and Robert D. Rachlin. The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Stolleis, Michael. The Law Under the Swastika: Studies on Legal History in Nazi Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

To answer the question you asked: Yes, because at least one history professor knows enough about judicial opposition to Hitler to have given a public lecture on the subject.

Source: University of Durham: Lectures and Seminars: "IAS Fellows' Public Lecture - Why Adolf Hitler Spared the Judges: judicial opposition against the Nazi state" by Prof. Hans Petter Graver of the University of Oslo, Nov 8, 2016.