Berlin.
Laws that came into force during the Nazi era still apply – and they carry the appropriate vocabulary. That should change.
In the Health Practitioners Law the traces of National Socialism in German law are still immediately apparent. Right in the introduction it says that the “Reich government” has passed the following law. And paragraph 2 stipulates that the “Reich Minister of the Interior” and the “Reich Minister for Science, Education and Public Education” can allow easier conditions for non-medical practitioners to study medicine.
The law for non-medical practitioners came into force in 1939 – in the middle of the Nazi era. And it is not the only law that has not been freed from the vocabulary of the National Socialists to this day. In a letter to the federal ministries, Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) states that an examination by his house has shown “that the remaining need for adjustment – especially with regard to Reich legal terms – affects ten laws and twelve statutory ordinances”.
Buschmann wants to remove Nazi language from laws
These legal provisions should now be “examined by the responsible departments for any adjustment requirements” and adjusted in “legal adjustment laws”, it says Bushman’s letter, which is available to our editors. These include the law on the German Savings Banks and Giro Association of 1933, the Ordinance on Public Casinos of 1938 and the “Ordinance on Tax Concessions for Foundations”.
“Much has already been achieved” in the past, the Minister of Justice notes. “Especially with the earlier ones sanction laws Parliament has comprehensively amended or repealed numerous pre-constitutional provisions that were still in force from the National Socialist era.”
Almost two dozen laws and regulations still contain Nazi vocabulary
In 2021, for example, the Bundestag had already passed the law on changing the name of the Nazi language exempted, where terms like “Reichsregierung” were also included. With the law, Jewish fellow citizens were stigmatized as anti-Semitic during the Nazi era. The initiative for the reform went back to the Federal Government’s Anti-Semitism Commissioner, Felix Klein.
The already reformed laws would not, however, relieve the federal government “from the permanent task of checking the existing law to determine which regulations need to be adjusted,” writes Minister Buschmann. His house has drawn up a list of almost two dozen applicable laws and ordinances in which Nazi vocabulary are included. The annex and the letter have now been sent to the various federal ministries, which are responsible for the respective laws.
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