Dr. Orth: Please explain briefly to the Tribunal what one understands under German law by “matters of descent.”
Defendant Altstoetter: The fact that from the biological point of view a certain man has fathered a certain child is under the German civil code, the decisive criterion for the status and the legal position of the child, and therefore, also for the rights and claims of such a child. However, as we know, it is frequently difficult to establish the true biological descent of a child, and it was particularly difficult at the time of the promulgation of the civil code. Pursuant to the achievements of biological science, the German legislator had established certain legal suppositions concerning the legal descent. On the basis of those provisions the biological descent and the legal descent not infrequently appeared to be different. As science progressed, in particular in the field of biochemistry, hereditary biology, and anthropology, after the civil code had come into force, more and more reliable methods of science were discovered in order to prove or at least exclude biological descent of a child from a certain father. As a result, litigations between father and child became more and more frequent concerning the true biological descent, that is to say, concerning the question as to whether the legal father was also, biologically speaking, the child’s father.
Under German law, all those cases of litigation are described as matters of descent. A partial complex is formed by those cases where Jews and persons of mixed descent, in the majority already adults, wanted the matter clarified in a court for themselves or their progeny, that contrary to the legal supposition, biologically and consequently also legally, they were not—or, at any rate, not to the extent that had been assumed—the children of a Jew or a person of mixed descent.
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Presiding Judge Brand: Could you tell us in a few words what, if anything, your Department VI had to do with matters pertaining to descent cases such as you have described them?
Defendant Altstoetter: Those descent cases played a great part from the point of view of my department exercising supervision. I shall revert to that matter quite briefly.
Q. Over whom or over what did you exercise supervision?
A. The Ministry of Justice, because of the treatment to be accorded to such descent cases constantly received complaints, in particular, complaints stating that these proceedings never made any progress. Furthermore, and I shall revert to this, too, we received complaints—
Q. That doesn’t answer my question. I am sorry to interrupt you. Your department exercised supervision in matters pertaining to descent. Over whom did you exercise supervision?
A. We had that supervision over the courts and over the public prosecutors.