TOPEKA — Speakers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will deliver the educational program “Law, Justice, and the Holocaust” to nearly 300 judges and justices from Kansas’ appellate and district courts at the Kansas Judicial Conference June 12 in Topeka.
The conference is for the state’s justices, judges, magistrate judges, and senior and retired judges, to fulfill annual continuing judicial and legal education requirements.
Chief Justice Lawton Nuss of the Supreme Court recommended the program to the conference’s planning committee based on positive reviews he had heard from chief justices in other states.
“This is a timeless topic relevant to all judges and justices. It helps us understand our role in democracy and why we can’t take our responsibilities lightly,” Nuss said.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Law, Justice, and the Holocaust” program challenges legal professionals to critically examine the decisions German jurists made and the pressures they faced under the Nazi regime.
The presentation will include a discussion of the Holocaust by interpreting images from the 1930s and 1940s with emphasis on the role played by law and non-Nazi judges in the destruction of democracy and the establishment of the Nazi German state.
Judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms and civil rights, and the guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not.
Against that backdrop, the presenters will encourage thoughtful debate on the role of the judiciary in society and its responsibilities in the United States today: What is the responsibility of judges to the system as a whole? What have been the challenges to a fair and impartial administration of justice in the United States today? What can judges do right now to ensure the kinds of failures that led to the Holocaust do not happen here?
The program will be presented by Marcus A. Appelbaum and Dr. William F. Meinecke, Jr.
Appelbaum is director of the museum’s Law, Justice, and Society Initiatives, for which he has created and facilitated training models for more than 80,000 law enforcement professionals around the country. Inspired by his grandmother who survived the Holocaust, he began working at the museum as a high school intern, serving as a docent, collecting survivor testimony, and representing the Museum at the Seventh Millennium Evening at the White House in 1999. He received a BA in history from The George Washington University and a master’s degree in museum management from the Bank Street College of Education in New York City.
Meinecke is a historian for the museum’s leadership development programs and is the author of Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust, published by the museum in 2007. He joined the museum’s staff in 1992 to help create the Historical Atlas of the Holocaust and a multimedia learning site for students. A graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he also attended the Universities of Bonn and Berlin in Germany and received an MA and a PhD in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. His dissertation is titled “Conflicting Loyalties: The Supreme Court in Weimar and Nazi Germany, 1918–1945.”