As an assistant, I was put in charge of legislative preparatory work in the field of commercial and economic law, and I continued to do that work when after a few months I became Geheimer Regierungsrat and Vortragsrat at the Reich Justice Office. When in 1927 I became ministerial director, I still continued to deal with the same tasks. In 1931, the only Under Secretary of the Reich Justice Office, Dr. Joel, an old gentleman—not to be confused with the defendant Joel—was appointed minister, and I took his position as Under Secretary. I retained that position when in 1932 the Bruening cabinet was replaced by the Papen cabinet, and when Guertner, who had previously been Minister of Justice of Bavaria became Reich Minister of Justice. Reich Minister Joel, as well as Reich Minister Guertner at that time dealt with penal matters themselves. I merely dealt with matters of civil law.
Only when in 1934 the Prussian Ministry of Justice was merged with the Reich Ministry of Justice, and now a vast number of administrative tasks were transferred to the Reich Ministry of Justice, then a new Under Secretary position was created, and that for penal matters. The Under Secretary of the former Prussian Ministry, Under Secretary Freisler, obtained that post. That division of tasks in civil and penal matters remained in force when on 27 January 1941 quite suddenly Reich Minister of Justice Guertner died, and I, as the most senior Under Secretary, was placed in charge of the conduct of affairs. I retained my civil cases and Freisler dealt with penal matters. I was placed in charge of the conduct of affairs of the ministry as the senior Under Secretary. I was never appointed Deputy Minister of Justice, and I never had myself called so, because that was, of course, impossible. I only was in charge of the conduct of affairs.
This picture, that is to say, that I merely acted as a representative, but that I actually dealt with the same work which I had dealt with before, that became also outwardly apparent. On purpose, I never worked in the Minister’s office; I never moved into the Minister’s home; and I drew the salary of an Under Secretary, not that of a Minister. On 20 August 1942, at my own request, I resigned.
Q. You have described your work as Under Secretary, and you have said that you worked largely in the sphere of civil law. Which were the most important tasks with which you dealt?
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A. In accordance with the particular interest which I had always had in economic matters, and in accordance with the work I had done previously, I was allotted the task of cooperating during two particularly fateful years of the German Reich in the maintenance of support of the economic life of the country. It was the stabilization and maintenance of currency: that was in 1923 because of, and until the end of, the inflation, and later on in 1933 on the occasion of the economic collapse. The inflation period was followed by the establishment of the Rentenmark currency, a new currency which replaced the paper mark. The inflation was also followed by the ordinance at which I worked, under which businessmen had to draw up a balance in gold marks, and it was also followed by the tremendous task of remonetization legislation. The collapse of the banks necessitated many discussions and consultations, and ordinances as for instance concerning rates of interest. Later, I worked on the new law concerning drafts and checks, and I may quote as my special work the two big economic laws promulgated in 1937, the law on shares and the law on patents. When in 1942 I resigned from my office, a new law on companies with limited liability was just about to be issued. At that time the general reform of civil law had been started, not immediately by way of a new codification, but by individual laws. When I left my office, the marriage law and the testament law were completed.
Q. Apart from your professional work as a judge, and later on as an official in the Ministry, did you ever engage in any scientific research work?
A. I can wholeheartedly affirm that question. Immediately after I took my state examination, I started on my first big project, and the first book of mine, which appeared in 1904, was a treatise on the law of retention; it was a work of historical nature. At that time I intended to take on a university career, but nothing came of that, because my home university, Koenigsberg, did not create a new chair for commercial and economic law. But I could not give up my literary work, and ever since then that has occupied me consistently side by side with my official work. The special fields with which I dealt were economic law and voluntary jurisdiction, that is to say the law concerning the procedure in matters concerning family, hereditary, commercial law and document regulations. In 1923 I became Honorary Professor at the University of Berlin. Naturally, I followed that call while retaining my official position, and I held lectures at the University of Berlin until the outbreak of the war. In 1925 the University of Koenigsberg conferred upon me an honorary doctor’s degree of political science.
Q. Did you also deal with foreign law?
A. Yes, foreign law, too, has occupied me intensively for a long time. Perhaps I may first mention one of my latest works, a large comparative encyclopedia, the “Manual of Comparative Civil and Commercial Law.” That book summarizes reports on civil and commercial law of all countries, written mostly by national experts, and I may say the law of the United States is dealt with by Professor Atkinson of Kansas University. This work which necessitated a tremendous amount of correspondence, brought me in touch with eminent jurists all over the world. I have deepened those contacts since 1929, because I went abroad to hold lectures, and those trips were above all to give me an opportunity to observe the effect of the law, at least in some countries, actually on the spot. I did succeed in doing so in Argentina; in Chile, where I dealt especially with banking laws, I wrote an essay on that subject; and in Brazil where I became an honorary member of the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association. I held lectures in Budapest, Madrid, Warsaw, Stockholm, Copenhagen. I should like to add that I am coeditor of the periodical “Foreign and International Private Law”, a publication of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Association; and, also coeditor of a publication on Scandinavian law.[157]