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The Reichsgericht (, ) was the supreme criminal and civil court of Germany from 1879 to 1945, encompassing the periods of the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. It was based in Leipzig.
The Reichsgericht began its work on 1 October 1879, the date on which the (Imperial Judiciary Acts) came into effect. The acts standardised court types and procedural rules across the newly formed German Empire and established judicial independence and unrestricted access to the courts.
The court's jurisdiction included both criminal and civil cases. It handled appeals, charges of treason and, after 1920, the compatibility of state and national laws. Throughout its life, its major rulings tended to be conservative. They included the conviction of Karl Liebknecht for high treason in 1907, the lenient treatment of the men charged in the 1920 Kapp Putsch and support of the Nazi's Nuremberg Laws.
The Reichsgericht was abolished following Germany's defeat in World War II.
The Reichsgericht was a court of general jurisdiction. It ruled on criminal and civil cases (including civil disputes, legal acts of the state in its fiscal capacity, commercial matters and labour law). There was no separate labour court system ( ) until 1926. The Reichsgericht was also responsible for State liability. As vested competencies, the Reichsgericht decided on civil appeals of final judgments and complaints against orders of Higher Regional Courts (Oberlandesgerichte). Until 1934, the Reichsgericht ruled in the first and last instance on cases of high treason and treason if the crimes were directed against the German emperor or the state.
From 1920, with the implementation law for of the Weimar Constitution, the Reichsgericht also ruled on the compatibility of state and Reich law.
Critics saw the Reichsgericht as a continuation of the Prussian High Tribunal. The judiciary was characterised by monarchical conservatism. Particularly in the area of criminal law, critical voices were in the minority at the court during the Empire, as they were in other state institutions at the time. In 1912, for example, the court ruled that the publication by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of a brochure that was aimed at civil servants and called on them to vote for the SPD was offensive. In its verdict of 12 October 1907 in the high treason trial against Karl Liebknecht, the Reichsgericht stated that the unconditional obedience of soldiers to the emperor was a central provision of the Constitution of the German Empire. Liebknecht had argued that imperial orders were null and void if they were intended to violate the constitution. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for acts preliminary to high treason.
In the 1921 Leipzig war crimes trials which took place before the Reichsgericht, only a few German war criminals were punished. Many cases were dropped, and of the few convictions, the verdicts against two members of the navy for sinking an English hospital ship were later secretly overturned. On 23 November 1931, Carl von Ossietzky was sentenced to 18 months in prison for espionage in the Weltbühne trial because an article published in his magazine had revealed the secret and illegal rearmament of the Reichswehr. (1987). 9783889771254, Lamuv Verlag. ISBN 9783889771254
Since violence from the right was not countered as forcefully as that from the left – some verdicts in the trials of the right-wing Feme murders in particular justified the accusation – the Weltbühne trial and others like it contributed to the view that the judiciary during the Weimar Republic was "blind in its right eye".
The Reichsgericht made some groundbreaking decisions in the field of civil law during the period. Revaluation case law, for example, which developed under the impact of German hyperinflation and the Great Depression, was nothing short of revolutionary. The Reichsgericht for the first time granted itself the authority to examine laws for their validity, which led to the previously recognised mark-for-mark principle (par value principle) being abandoned due to the extremely high rate of inflation.
In the period that followed, the Reichsgericht did not oppose the Nazi takeover or the regime's numerous illegal acts. Instead it became deeply entangled in the National Socialist justice system, for example when it sentenced the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe to death on the basis of the retroactively applied Law on Imposition and Enforcement of the Death Penalty in the Reichstag fire trial. The acquittal of the other four defendants was one of the reasons why the Reichsgericht was stripped of its jurisdiction in matters of treason in 1934 by the law that established the People's Court.
Germany's Anschluss in 1938 led to the dissolution of the Supreme Court of Justice in Vienna and the transfer of its jurisdiction to the Reichsgericht. When the measure was implemented on 1 April 1939, the Reichsgericht became the supreme court of appeal for Austrian civil cases. Although partial reforms were made to Austrian substantive law, the Austrian General Civil Code remained the applicable private law code in Austria. Meanwhile, the 8th Civil Senate was established at the Reichsgericht, to which all legal matters concerning Austria, the Sudetenland territories and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were assigned whenever the jurisdiction of the first five senates was not applicable. It was dissolved due to understaffing before the Reichsgericht was abolished.
In 1935, in a further development of the law, the Reichsgericht recognised even before the Nuremberg Laws were passed that if a marriage partner was Jewish, it was grounds for annulling the marriage, although a formal legal basis for such terminations was not created until the Marriage Act enacted in 1938. On the interpretation or reinterpretation of contracts with Jews, it ruled that "the National Socialist worldview requires that only those of German origin (and those legally equal to them) be treated as legally valid in the German Reich". With the ruling, the Reichsgericht adopted the racist subversion of the private law system that was developed by the German legal scholarship of the time, especially by the (Kieler Schule). One of its most important representatives, the legal philosopher Karl Larenz, wrote in 1935, just a few months before the judgment was handed down: "A person is only a legal comrade if he is a national comrade; a national comrade is a person of German blood. Those outside the national community are not within the law."
Beginning on 25 August 1945, 39 judges of the Reichsgericht (more than one third of the total staff) were arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret service). The four survivors were released between 1950 and 1955; the others had starved to death or died of disease.
Provisional supreme courts were formed in the individual occupation zones. In 1950, the newly established Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) took over the tasks of the Reichsgericht for the Federal Republic of Germany. Former judges of the Reichsgericht were among the first judges in the court. In 1952, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that the Reichsgericht had ceased to exist on 30 October 1945. In the German Democratic Republic, the Supreme Court of East Germany took over the Reichsgericht's duties.
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