. NMT03-T0286
Volume III · Page 286
| the Minister's home; and I drew the salary of
an Under Secretary, not that of a Minister. On 20 August 1942, at my own
request, I resigned. Q. You have described your work as Under Secretary, and you have said that you worked largely in the sphere of civil law. Which were the most important tasks with which you dealt? |
| * * * * * * * * * * |
| A. In accordance with the particular interest
which I had always had in economic matters, and in accordance with the work I
had done previously, I was allotted the task of cooperating during two
particularly fateful years of the German Reich in the maintenance of support of
the economic life of the country. It was the stabilization and maintenance of
currency: that was in 1923 because of, and until the end of, the inflation, and
later on in 1933 on the occasion of the economic collapse. The inflation period
was followed by the establishment of the Rentenmark currency, a new currency
which replaced the paper mark. The inflation was also followed by the ordinance
at which I worked, under which businessmen had to draw up a balance in gold
marks, and it was also followed by the tremendous task of remonetization
legislation. The collapse of the banks necessitated many discussions and
consultations, and ordinances as for instance concerning rates of interest.
Later, I worked on the new law concerning drafts and checks, and I may quote as
my special work the two big economic laws promulgated in 1937, the law on
shares and the law on patents. When in 1942 I resigned from my office, a new
law on companies with limited liability was just about to be issued. At that
time the general reform of civil law had been started, not immediately by way
of a new codification, but by individual laws. When I left my office, the
marriage law and the testament law were completed. Q. Apart from your professional work as a judge, and later on as an official in the Ministry, did you ever engage in any scientific research work? A. I can wholeheartedly affirm that question. Immediately after I took my state examination, I started on my first big project. and the first book of mine, which appeared in 1904, was a treatise on the law of retention; it was a work of historical nature. At that time I intended to take on a university career, but nothing came of that, because my home university, Koenigsberg, did not create a new chair for commercial and economic law. But I could not give up my literary work, and ever since then that has occupied me consistently side by side with my official work. The special |
