Law, Foreign Policy, and the Question of Anti-Republicanism: Journalistic Treason Trials in Weimar Germany

Abstract After the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty obliged the German Reich to far-reaching military disarmament. Pacifist journalists who reported in the 1920s and early 1930s on illegal rearmament measures by the Reichswehr were threatened with legal action by the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, on charges of journalistic treason. Contemporary opponents of the proceedings, as well as modern research, accused the Reichsgericht of siding with the Reichswehr against the republican governments in its ruling in favor of the Reichswehr’s illegal rearmament. However, the rulings of the Reichsgericht were not solely based on legal provisions; they also invoked the official guidelines of German foreign policy. The article demonstrates that the Foreign Office exerted far greater influence than the Reichswehr Ministry for most of the period. It thereby highlights the tension between law and politics in political criminal trials and nuances the so-called “crisis of confidence” in the Weimar judiciary.