Was the mass murder of jews and other victims in gas chambers in concentration camps legal at the time? If the courts in Nazi Germany were impartial would the perpetrators (the people giving the orders and the ones obeying them) have been prosecuted for murder under German penal law?

by Erich-von-Falkenhayn

I am referring to the general question of the legality of the Holocaust or Porajmos. Were the orders the soldiers have been given in contrast to German law? The top tier Nazis were sentenced in Nuremberg for international war crimes (offences that weren‘t codified at the time the crimes were committed). But those are part of international criminal law; I‘m wondering if the holocaust was forbidden under national German criminal or military law. These actions were obvious murders in the sense of section 211 of the German Criminal Code but I‘m wondering if the Nazis enacted some sort of law or decree suspending these murder provisions. Gustav Radbruch famously said that if a law is undeniably in stark contrast to the general sense of „justice“ than you don‘t have to follow it. This would mean that the people in power did legalise the Holocaust with concrete provisions.

Klesk_vs_Xaero

While you may have checked them already, these previous replies with contributions by /u/commiespaceinvader and /u/kieslowskifan may be of some interest.

New contributions are, of course, always welcome.