The historic evolution of the German judge is also in conformity with his training and his selection. To decide what is right does not require constructive or scientific thinking but above all, it presupposes the art to appraise human beings, to understand human emotions and the ability to comprehend all phenomena of life. Training methods of today lead to abstract thinking, to materialism, and to an ignorance of the ways of the world. The theoretical scientific method taught nowadays in universities is apt to imbue the student after being first introduced to a juristic line of thought with abstract conceptions and with a system of logic which makes it very difficult for the student to find his way later on in a world of facts. The outcome is the abstract lawyer, subject to so much criticism who does no longer recognize human beings but only conceptions, moreover, it is also the source of ever recurring disagreements between politically trained National Socialists and lawyers. Very often there is a world of difference between them. The point from which all training reforms must go out must be paragraph 20 of the Party program, which reads:

“The curriculum of all educational institutions must be adapted to practical life.”

In detail this means—

1. Substitution of the logical, abstract method of thinking by a method of conception taken from practical everyday life. No “lecture” with a deductive training method, given by a professor to a hundred or more “listeners,” but some kind of working community of perhaps twenty to thirty students who will be introduced inductively to the system—that is empirically from life—by a teacher endowed with scientific, practical and educational talents. These teachers are either university teachers who carry out at the same time the duties of a judge or administrative lawyer, or else judges in office who teach simultaneously at a university. The selection of about 200 qualified leaders who must be held in readiness at the end of the war for a fundamental reeducation of our youth is the most pressing problem. Only such men are able to guide the productive energies of the beginners into the right channels, and so prevent a false, abstract education as well as the cutting of lectures and the cramming down of lessons.

2. These working communities to be established in universities must ever maintain close contact with practical work (court, administration, Party). The strict division practiced heretofore—at first 3 years’ university training exclusively, then 3 years’ practical work—has provided them with a dangerous, theoretical “preinoculation.”

3. A man who chooses to be a judge and who therefore administers justice to all phases of human endeavor must know life itself, the real and practical life. Therefore, anyone who after passing the probationary state examination, at the approximate age of 26, has worked for 2 years in the judicial sphere as a candidate with some court—as has been customary heretofore—has not the “calling” of a judge. He has only become acquainted there with a small sector of life from a very definite angle. Only he who has steeled himself and proved his mettle outside a safe civil service position shall pass judgment and decide over human lives. He may stand his test in accordance with his inclination in economic life (banking, industry, shipping, commerce, agriculture), or as an attorney who looks at the objects of justice from “another” angle, or by taking an active part in Party or administrative life either at home or abroad. The decisive factor is that the future judge has not lived his life only “behind bars.” He also must have stood “before the bars,” in real life. These requirements lead us to recognize two facts.

a. No one should be appointed a judge before the age of 35. To judge requires a ripe judgment, a certain spiritual detachment, and a very pronounced character; qualities which can hardly be asked of a 28-year-old candidate who has never had to struggle in real life.

b. No one who has acquired a life position in another profession wishes to become a judge at the age of 35, unless the following primary conditions are created: The position of a German judge must be of such high standard with regards to ideal and material rewards as to attract even the best of our youth. By an elastic legislation and the freedom of the bench, the leadership of the State places such full confidence upon the judges—as are granted to no one else in an autocratic state—that only the best can be considered to deserve this confidence. He who has begun a thing must go on with it; if there are to be men in an autocratic state invested with the freedom of the bench, then this freedom should be granted to a few and exceedingly well qualified men only.

VII

The demand to reduce the number of judges—I reckon with a reduction from about 16,000 to about 8,000 for Germany proper—gives us the problem of a fundamental reform of the entire organization for the administration of justice. A mere reduction of the personnel without a simultaneous reform of working methods and of the organization would not result in improving the work but only to its deterioration as is the case everywhere else in general administration. I have laid down my conception of this reform of justice in the following detailed proposals: