Article 19 of the NSDAP Programme and Its Literary Inspiration

On February 24, 1920, Adolf Hitler announced the 25-point program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Article 19 of the program proclaimed: “We demand that Roman Law, which serves a materialistic world order, be replaced by a German common law” (German: Wir fordern Ersatz für das der materialistischen Weltordnung dienende römische Recht durch ein deutsches Gemeinrecht). The presence of Roman law on the Nazi agenda aroused surprise from the beginning. The more time passed, the more sophisticated attempts were made to find its cultural-ideological basis. As a result, a complicated ideology was added to it post factum. Meanwhile, it cannot be ruled out that the inspiration for Hitler and his aides was not some great political tracts, but a primitive anti-Semitic lampoon – Judas Schuldbuch: Eine Deutsche Abrechnung. The book, under the pseudonym Wilhelm Meister, was published by a minor financial official named Wilhelm Meister in 1919.