Omission of the legal class on the STF has a parallel in Nazi Germany

The scarce reaction of the legal class against the abuses of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) has a parallel in Nazi Germany, according to judge Ludmila Lins Grilo, who was compulsorily retired by the Justice of Minas Gerais. For her, the omission of many renowned jurists and class bodies such as the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) regarding the authoritarian measures of the Supreme Court recalls a phenomenon that occurred with the Nazis in power.

“The silence of the legal environment is one of the elements that characterize dictatorships. I’ll give you an example: in the book ‘Hitler and the Germans’, by the philosopher Eric Voegelin, there is a part where the author says that after the Hitler regime, after the fall of National Socialism, he started going around libraries in Germany looking for the writings of the jurists of the time to find out what they wrote during National Socialism, during the horrors of Nazism, what these jurists wrote [sobre o regime]. And he realized the following: there was practically nothing,” reports Ludmila.

For her, “what is happening in Brazil today is exactly this phenomenon of the failure of jurists to write, to talk about what is happening in real time”. “This is a characteristic of dictatorship. It has already happened in Germany and it is happening in Brazil today.”

In the book in question, Voegelin relates: “I asked members of the Institute to do a survey to investigate whether, in monographs or long essays, German law professors had taken a position on the trials of National Socialist crimes. There is some literature about this issue? The result of the research is this: professors of Philosophy of Law and Public Law did not express themselves in monographs about the judgments of the Einsatzgruppen, that is, these mass murders.”