ABSTRACT
The perversion of justice in Stalinist Russia, as in Nazi Germany, provides liberal theorists with their most compelling evidence of what the negative virtue of justice is meant to prevent. Nazi derision of the law was more open, but in spite of Hitler's contempt for the legal profession, German lawyers were remarkably ready to provide the rationale of their own debasement. The liberal idea of natural justice is grounded in the idea of individual responsibility and under totalitarianism on collectivity and community. The Party's legal machinery abandoned positivist law, cut through the legal technicalities of abstract law and completely jettisoned both the notion of equality before the law and the rules governing factual evidence. This was done under a pretence of returning to natural justice in practice for National Socialism which often meant retroactive laws personally formulated by Hitler providing a legitimate framework for such measures as the execution of communists, Jews creating a bombed and flattened moral landscape.
