The Anti-Nazi Origins of Militant Democracy

This book examines a group of mostly Social Democratic resisters and emigres whose biographies from the Nazi seizure of power until the defeat and occupation of Germany caused a radical change in the constitutional politics of postwar West Germany. Most notably, they embraced the idea of a 'militant democracy' in which the free democratic order would be protected from democracy's supposedly self-destructive proclivities by banning extremist parties and organizations from the political arena and empowering what is arguably the strongest constitutional court in the world to review legislation, enforce militant democracy and generally act as a 'guardian of the constitution.' This was an antifascist response to popular support for the German dictatorship and its worst crimes. In the postwar, these anti-Nazis empowered courts to review legislation as a way to try Nazi war criminals and purge Nazi ideology from German law.