Abstract

Nazi Dictatorship and the constitutional history of the “German Identity”

After 1933, many German constitutional historians worked on the justification of the Nazi Dictatorship. But how did they manage to write an apologetic constitutional history for this regime? The answer lies in the then popular notion that the Nazi Dictatorship was the fulfillment of the “German Identity”: Constitutional historians claimed that an eternal core of the “German Identity” always existed in the past, but only came into full fruition with the emergence of the “Third Reich”. This essentialist ideology created a teleological perspective on constitutional history and provided two lines of argumentation for the justification of the Nazi Dictatorship: First of all, it enabled constitutional historians to construe history as an existential antagonism and successful battle between the “German Identity” and its “enemy” forces. Furthermore, the “German identity” allowed them to reframe the National Socialist Ideology into a natural force of history and a paramount principle for the “German people”.