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FIVE YEAR LATER, in January 1933, Hitler came to power, a matter of great concern to Lauterpacht. An avid reader of The Times, he might have read the paper’s lengthy extracts of Mein Kampf, describing Hitler’s years in Vienna and the observation that Jewish culture was a “spiritual pestilence, worse than Black Death.” One extract, setting out Hitler’s views on Jews and Marxism, explicitly denied “the value of the individual among men,” emphasizing the importance of “nationality and race” and the role of religious destiny. “By fighting against the Jews I am doing the Lord’s work,” Hitler wrote.
The National Socialists were on the rise, with serious implications for Lwów and Żółkiew. Poland signed a nonaggression pact with Germany and cast aside the 1919 Minorities Treaty. In September 1935, the Nuremberg decrees were passed in Germany, to protect the purity of the Aryan race. Marriage and sexual relations between Jew and German were prohibited; Jews were stripped of citizenship and most rights and banned from employment as lawyer, doctor, or journalist. It was a far cry from Cricklewood in north London, where Lauterpacht lived.
In 1935, Lauterpacht’s parents, Aron and Deborah, visited London, reporting that life in Lwów was more difficult than ever, with a collapsing economy and rising discrimination. The family had moved from Teatralna Street to May the Third Street as a period of relative stability ended with the death in May of Marshal Piłsudski. By contrast, life in Walm Lane was comfortable. Lauterpacht was on the up, promoted to reader in law at the LSE, with a blossoming reputation. In 1933, he’d published a second book—The Function of Law in the International Community—to further acclaim, a work that Lauterpacht considered his most important, touching on the theme of the individual in international law. He’d launched a pioneering collection of reports of international law cases from national and international courts—the Annual Digest and Reports of Public International Law Cases, today called the International Law Reports. He also completed a new edition of volume 2 of Oppenheim’s International Law, the treatise used by foreign ministries around the world, a volume on war law, in which the protection of civilians had a central place. “The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of all law,” Lauterpacht wrote in the preface. The words were prescient, a radical vision for an increasingly establishment figure.
Lauterpacht, Rachel, and Eli, Walm Lane, 1933
Lauterpacht didn’t shirk the big issues of the day. He wrote a paper titled “The Persecution of the Jews in Germany,” proposing action by the League of Nations to prevent discrimination on grounds of race or religion. When one reads the paper today, it feels tentative, for Lauterpacht was a pragmatist who knew that international law as it then was allowed Germany to persecute anyone not deemed to be an Aryan. Yet he believed that such persecution disturbed international relations and should be prohibited by “the public law of the world.” He hoped Spain, Ireland, or Norway might act on an issue of political morality. They didn’t, and the paper had no discernible impact.
Lauterpacht had his critics. As Jews flooded out of Germany, the League of Nations official with responsibility for refugees, James G. McDonald, decided to resign in protest at governmental inactions. To prepare a strong letter, he sought the help of Oscar Janowsky, a historian from the City College of New York, who traveled to London to enlist the support of Lauterpacht. The encounter went badly. Lauterpacht might be a “brilliant youngish man on the rise,” Janowsky wrote, but he was an “overbearing” man of self-importance who “pontificated like a judge” when he should be advocating a cause. Lauterpacht declined to work with one of Janowsky’s graduate students, prompting a tirade about Lauterpacht’s pomposity and arrogance, the absence of moral stature or generosity of spirit. A “libelous stereotype of the Galitzianer,” Janowsky wrote of him.
Lauterpacht wanted to “steam-roller” his own views and dismiss those of others. “Fidgety and impatient” during meetings, he “showed that he was no gentleman” and became patronizing and angry if he didn’t get his own way. Sensing he’d misbehaved, Lauterpacht sent Janowsky a grudging letter of apology. “I love to see my own work torn to pieces when I submit it to criticism,” he wrote. “I may be committing the mistake of thinking that others approached it in the same way.”
Despite the pressure, Lauterpacht resisted calls to support Germany’s treatment of the Jews being referred to the international court in The Hague. The idea was “inadequate, impracticable and highly dangerous.” He was not the easiest of colleagues, as he recognized the limits of international law, with gaps allowing states to discriminate and adopt measures such as the Nuremberg decrees.
In 1933, he qualified as a barrister. An early brief came from Haile Selassie, who wanted an opinion on Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia. In November 1936, another brief arrived, a request from a distinguished Swiss academic for a legal opinion on the protection of Jews in Upper Silesia. If they couldn’t get diplomatic protection, could they at least leave Germany with their possessions? Lauterpacht declined to give a legal opinion aimed at influencing the British government: the aims sought by the Swiss academic were simply not attainable.
Amid the gloom of world politics, Lauterpacht tried to persuade his parents to move permanently to England. Poland had by now shredded the 1919 Minorities Treaty, so the Jews and other minorities of Lwów were stripped of international legal protection. But Aron and Deborah decided to stay put in Lwów, which was home.