ABSTRACT
By May 1945, Germany was totally defeated. Typical for German legal science since 19th century was the definition of jurisprudence as a historic discipline, resulting in a strong role of the legal historical studies as part of the university training. During the first post-war years, the difference between ‘Zones of Occupation’ was small. In the first years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the illusion that traditional approaches and Marxist science could coexist was still alive. The GDR had no interest in losing all its non-socialist scientists, and in other fields, such as medicine, there was a real need for skilled professionals. Most legal historians were not Marxists. The West German trials of Uwe Wesel and others for ‘legal historical materialism’, a Marxist approach, had no effect on the legal historiography written in the GDR.
