Winfried Seibert - The girl that could not be named Esther

Dedicated to my daughter Esther

and her brothers Daniel

and Raphael

You can’t name her Esther. And you can’t name him Joshua. These are not truly Germanic names. – German bureaucratic and judicial decisions in 1938.

Residents of English-speaking countries are in the main accustomed to naming their children with any name they want. Other countries are not so permissive, requiring an approval for registration of names. In countries with a Christian tradition, a distinction is drawn between family names and given names, also called baptismal names or Christian names. In Germany this was customary as long ago as the 14th century. So long as there were no state registration authorities — that is, no office of vital records — and, to simplify a complex process, before the division of church and state, the church was responsible for putting order in names. Names of false gods or pagan heathens were frowned upon, while names of recognized saints and Biblical figures were desirable. It was impossible to give a non-Christian name to a Christian.

Similar restrictions on the choice of names arose after the Revolution of 1789 in France and in practically all European countries. Not so in the USA – there the law on personal status never developed in a fashion similar to that in Europe, and the resulting customs are correspondingly looser. Whether freedom is totally unlimited is hard to say, but the freedom there has led to varieties of names, which, when extravagant parents load extravagant names on their children, can develop into significant problems for the children. Whether Geronimo, son of the bassist Alex James, will later be happy with his name, will depend very much on how he regards the history of Indians in his country. Elijah Bob Patricius Goggi Q may let himself be reduced to a simple Elijah Bob, but this still leaves the question open of what the “Q” stands for in this name of the son of the front man for Bono. Whether Sharleen Spiteri of the pop band Texas thought of any joy to be brought her in writing her name as Mysty Kyd or whether she thought about her daughter, we probably will never know.

In Nazi Germany, this ordinarily innocuous law became part of the racist arsenal of the regime, a regime that had enthusiastic adherents all through the bureaucracy and the judicial system.

An article in a law journal caught the eye of attorney Winfried Seibert, born in 1938, and he set off on an ingenious search of German history in the Nazi period, looking for the girl who couldn’t be named Esther.

A determined pastor in a small town in the Ruhr Valley demanded in 1938 that his daughter’s name be registered as Esther. He ran into bureaucratic opposition and fought his case through the courts all the way to the Supreme Court for Civil Matters in Berlin. He lost. So did a park ranger, who wanted to perpetuate the family name Cuno Josua.

What the author has done in this book resembles the unfolding of a mystery story. Who was this minister, identified only as the Minister L. from the town of W.? Why was he so hard-headed? Who were these local officials who so adamantly defended the purity of German names? What kind of justice system enforced these laws?

The author started with L. from the town of W. With some ingenious detective work, he found the town, the likely person, and then even the son of that courageous pastor — though not the daughter Esther.

This book is a very close examination of the people involved — the minister, the bureaucrats, and especially the judges. The author reconstructs the life stories of the three judges who sat on the Supreme Court. Interestingly, the judges found that Esther was a criminal prostitute of the Jewish race, while Ruth, a name that one might expect to be condemned in the same way, was allowed as a Germanified name.

The book contains a fascinating reconstruction of the German justice system based on the use of this single case.

Through the use of this case, the readers sees the Nazi justice system and Germany itself through its pogroms and then into the war period itself. Instead of relying on masses of data and statistical compilations, this book energetically and passionately moves through the daily activities of Nazi justice. The unfolding of these items is a gripping tale that caught the attention of tens of thousands of German book-buyers and of reviewers throughout the German language press in Germany and in Israel (originally published in 1996).

And what of little Esther, who was denied her name so that she would not be embarrassed when she would be taken into the League of German Girls? Named Elisabeth by the officials, the author found notice of her baptism in 1946 as Esther. Unhappily, the search showed that the little girl had died of a childhood disease at age 2½, but her father had preserved her memory by renaming her after the defeat of the Nazis. The pastor himself served in the German army, but continued to incur the wrath of his superiors for his sermons, which used ambiguous language to denigrate the German leadership.

This is a story taken from the everyday workings of the legal system under the Third Reich, the Nazi regime. It is limited to a minor event that involved only a few people, but I think it is symptomatic of a much larger story.

The Nazis had no great love for the judiciary; nonetheless, that group certainly did not produce any resistance fighters. Judges just didn’t do that sort of thing. The judges kept up the pretense of business as usual; they adapted. It’s true that they were subject to the pressure of the National Socialist state apparatus. Judges were kept on a short rein by judicial instruction letters that made a mockery of judicial independence. Many of the judges let themselves be coerced, suffering from more or less of a bad conscience, into giving the National Socialist system what they thought was its due because it was, after all, the State.

Thus, for the German judges, May 8, 1945, the date of Germany’s surrender, was a day of liberation. Their grateful commemoration of this event has filled tomes. Unfortunately, these have all gone missing. Or is there more to the story?

In the early post-war years, we were subjected to attempts at forgetting, at concealing, at hushing up, and even out and out lying. The first president of the new Federal Court of Justice created after the war, Hermann Weinkauff, is responsible for a multi-author study of the judiciary in the Third Reich – happily, he never completed it. The book is noteworthy only for its self-excusing tone, not for any attempt at a critical look at the institution. Others had previously described the judges in the Third Reich as victims of their training in legal positivism. They had merely applied the letter of the law as it had been laid down by an unscrupulous legislature. That was the grand illusion of the postwar judiciary in West Germany. The legal historian Bernd Ruethers made the first attempts in 1968 to come to terms in a scholarly way with the distortion of the law and of legal decisions in the Third Reich.

But that is not what this book is about. I am reporting here only about three decisions handed down by the Superior Court in the year 1938, in which it was decided what given names a person could have if he or she was born under the Third Reich. These three decisions by a central court have not yet been subject to scrutiny, even though they lead deep into the secret heart of National Socialist justice. It is often said that, at least in the case of civil law, the judges managed to stand firm against their Nazi masters. After all, civil law concerns itself with everyday matters, such as rent problems, contracts, social issues, and, as we shall see, the question of what names a person could have. But the truth is that the judges did not stand firm on such issues, not by a long shot. Their decisions and their findings formed only small building blocks of the structure of an unjust state, but they were still part and parcel of the injustice that was done.