Ernst Rudolf Huber

File:Unterschrift Ernst Rudolf Huber.svg

Signature of Ernst Rudolf Huber

Ernst Rudolf Huber (8 June 1903 – 28 October 1990) was a German constitutional lawyer and "crown jurist" of the Third Reich. During the National Socialist era, he was one of the leading constitutional lawyers and justified the dictatorship of his time. Regarding his post-1945 activities, he is best known for his eight-volume German Constitutional History since 1789, which covers the period 1789–1933 — focusing on Prussia — and was published from 1957 to 1991.

Biography

Ernst Rudolf Huber was born in Oberstein an der Nahe (today the city of Idar-Oberstein), which was located in the Principality of Birkenfeld, an exclave of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. His parents were the middle-class merchant August Rudolf Huber (1868–1943) and his wife Helene, née Wild (1874–1955). Huber was of Protestant denomination. Early in life, Huber was involved in the youth movement.

Huber was a student of Carl Schmitt, with whom he received his doctorate in 1926 on a topic of constitutional church law concerning Article 138 of the Weimar Constitution. After his habilitation in 1931 under Heinrich Göppert with a thesis on economic law, he initially taught as a private lecturer at the University of Bonn. In 1932, under the direction of Schmitt, he served as legal advisor to the presidential cabinets of von Papen and von Schleicher and assisted Schmitt in the preparations for the Prussia versus Reich trial.

Long before a possible takeover by Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP was foreseeable, Huber was an avowed and energetic opponent of the Weimar Republic and supported an authoritarian Führerstaat similar — in his view — to the German Empire of 1871 to 1918. This is extensively documented in the more than sixty commentaries on contemporary events that he published under various pseudonyms prior to 1933.

On April 28, 1933, Huber was appointed to the University of Kiel and joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933. In Kiel, as the successor to the renowned constitutional law professor and judge at the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, Walther Schücking, he benefited from his dismissal. Schücking had initially been granted leave of absence for political reasons on the basis of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, and was compulsorily dismissed from the civil service in the same year. Ernst Rudolf Huber, together with his colleagues Georg Dahm, Karl Larenz, Karl Michaelis, Franz Wieacker, Karl August Eckhardt, Paul Ritterbusch, Friedrich Schaffstein and Wolfgang Siebert, formed the Kiel School — also officially referred to as the "Shock Troop Faculty" — which advocated a "legal renewal" in the service of the Reich.

In 1937, Huber followed a call to the renowned Leipzig University and in 1941 to the newly founded Reichsuniversität Strasbourg. There he organized the establishment of the Faculty of Law and Political Science. In November 1944, in view of the advance of the Western Allies, he left for Germany on the right bank of the Rhine. There, in the winter semester of 1944/45, he initially received a teaching assignment at the University of Heidelberg through the mediation of his friend Ernst Forsthoff. In the spring of 1945, he retreated with his family to Falkau in the Upper Black Forest as a private citizen, where Huber's family temporarily lived under one roof with the family of the historian Hermann Heimpel.

Huber was one of the leading constitutional lawyers during the National Socialist era and is therefore considered by historical researchers to be one of the "crown jurists" of the Third Reich. In 1937, he presented a comprehensive account of National Socialist law in the Führer's state under the title Constitution, which appeared in a second edition in 1939 as Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich. In this work he spoke of the "complete elimination of Jewry" and thus belonged to the group of those jurists who supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and disseminated them through university teaching. Furthermore, he wrote a study on military constitutional history (Heer und Staat in der deutschen Geschichte, 1938) as well as several essays on the history of ideas, which formed an unpublished compilation. Huber was editor of the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft from 1934 to 1944, together with his Kiel colleagues in national economics, Hermann Bente and Andreas Predöhl, until its publication was discontinued.

Huber's views on personal liberties and judicial independence include the following statements:

In particular, the liberty rights of the individual (...) are not compatible with the principle of national law. There is no personal, pre-state and extra-state freedom of the individual to be respected by the state.

The living völkisch law is realized in the people primarily through the Führer, and the judicial judge of the new Reich is necessarily subordinate to the Führer's will, which is precisely the expression of the highest law.

After the war, Huber continued to live with his family in Falkau (Black Forest) and from 1949 in Freiburg. Together with Carl Schmitt, Reinhard Höhn and Otto Koellreutter, he was one of the few legal scholars who were denied a return to the university for longer because of their past. But in 1952, he received an honorary professorship at the University of Freiburg. In 1957, he was finally appointed to the University of Social Sciences. Since the incorporation of this small university into the University of Göttingen, he was taught in Göttingen from 1962 to 1968.

Family

From 1933 Huber was married to Tula Simons, daughter of Walter Simons, President of the Reich Court. She was an assistant to Carl Schmitt during the Weimar period and worked as a lawyer in Freiburg after 1945. From this marriage came a total of five sons, including the Bonn civil law professor Ulrich Huber and the former chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and Berlin-Brandenburg Bishop Wolfgang Huber, who together with his father edited a five-volume collection of sources on German state church law of the 19th and early 20th centuries. During his time in Göttingen (1962–1968), Huber lived for a time in a shared apartment with his son Wolfgang, who was then studying Protestant theology. After his retirement in 1968, Huber lived in Freiburg.

Works

• Die Garantie der kirchlichen Vermögensrechte in der Weimarer Verfassung. Zwei Abhandlungen zum Problem der Auseinandersetzung von Staat und Kirche (1927)
• Verträge zwischen Staat und Kirche im Deutschen Reich (1930)
• Das Deutsche Reich als Wirtschaftsstaat (1931)
• Wirtschaftsverwaltungsrecht. Institutionen des öffentlichen Arbeits- und Unternehmensrechts (1932)
• Reichsgewalt und Staatsgerichtshof (1932)
• Die Gestalt des deutschen Sozialismus (1934)
• Neue Grundbegriffe des hoheitlichen Rechts (1935)
• Vom Sinn der Verfassung. Rede, gehalten am 30. Januar 1935, anläßlich der Feier des Reichsgründungstags und des Tages der deutschen Revolution (1935)
• Wesen und Inhalt der politischen Verfassung (1935)
• Verfassung (1937; republished in an enlarged edition with the title Verfassungsrecht des Großdeutschen Reiches, 1939)
• Staat und Wirtschaft (1938)
• Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann und die deutsche Verfassungsbewegung (1937)
• Heer und Staat in der deutschen Geschichte (1938–1943)
• Der Volksgedanke in der Revolution von 1848 (1940)
• Verfassungskrisen des Zweiten Reiches (1940)
• Rechtliche Gestaltung des öffentlichen Amtes und rechtliche Gestaltung des privaten Anstellungsverhältnisses. Relazione presentata al 1. Convegno in Roma, l' 2 giugno 1938 XVII (1939)
• Der Kampf um die Führung im Weltkrieg (1941)
• "Die verfassungsrechtliche Stellung des Beamtentums". In: Festschrift für Heinrich Siber 1 (1941), pp. 275–325.
• Bau und Gefüge des Reiches (1941)
• Aufstieg und Entfaltung des deutschen Volksbewusstseins (1942)
• Idee und Ordnung des Reiches (1943; editor)
• Goethe und der Staat (1944)
• Wirtschaftsverwaltungsrecht (1953–1954; 2 volumes)
• Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789 (1957–1991; 8 volumes)
  • 1: Reform und Restauration 1789 bis 1830 (1957)
  • 2: Der Kampf um Einheit und Freiheit 1830 bis 1850 (1960)
  • 3: Bismarck und das Reich (1963)
  • 4: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (1969)
  • 5: Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung: 1914–1919 (1978)
  • 6: Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (1981)
  • 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Republik (1984)
  • 8: Registerband (1991)
• Zur Problematik des Kulturstaats (1958)
• Selbstverwaltung der Wirtschaft (1958)
• Das Empfehlungsverbot. Eine kartellrechtliche Studie (1959)
• Nationalstaat und Verfassungsstaat. Studien zur Geschichte der modernen Staatsidee (1965)
• Grundgesetz und wirtschaftliche Mitbestimmung (1970)
• Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Staatskirchenrechts (1973–1995; 5 volumes; edited with Wolfgang Huber)
  • 1: Staat und Kirche vom Ausgang des alten Reichs bis zum Vorabend der bürgerlichen Revolution (1973)
  • 2: Staat und Kirche im Zeitalter des Hochkonstitutionalismus und des Kulturkampfs, 1848–1890 (1976)
  • 3: Staat und Kirche von der Beilegung des Kulturkampfs bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (1990)
  • 4: Staat und Kirche in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (1988)
  • 5: Register (1995; with the assistance of Rupprecht Stiefel)
• Bewahrung und Wandlung. Studien zur deutschen Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte (1975)
• Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte (1961–1997; 5 volumes)
  • 1: Deutsche Verfassungsdokumente 1803–1850 (1961)
  • 2: Deutsche Verfassungsdokumente 1851–1900 (1964)
  • 3: Deutsche Verfassungsdokumente 1900–1918 (1990)
  • 4: Deutsche Verfassungsdokumente 1919–1933 (1992)
  • 5: Registerband (1997; with the assistance of Gerhard Granier)

Further reading

• Huber-Simons, Tula & Albrecht Huber (1973). "Bibliographie der Veröffentlichungen von Ernst Rudolf Huber". In: Ernst Forsthoff, Werner Weber, Franz Wieacker, eds., Festschrift für Ernst Rudolf Huber zum 70. Geburtstag am 8. Juni 1973. Göttingen: Otto Schwartz (1973), pp. 385–416.

External links

• Works by Ernst Rudolf Huber at German National Library