“Carl Schmitt’s Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives”, 2012-05-22 ():
Though the ideas of Carl Schmitt about emergency powers have been the subject of considerable commentary recently, the writers do not reference his culminating article on emergencies.
That piece was a paean to Adolf Hitler’s murder of scores of supposed adversaries in the “Night of the Long Knives” of June 30, 1934. The article, “The Fuhrer Protects Justice”, represents the lengths to which Schmitt was willing to go in justifying the most drastic use of emergency powers.
Some of Schmitt’s other prose from the Nazi era can simply be excised from the corpus of his work, but this piece has to be considered as a part of his basic teaching. As far as I can determine, unlike much of Schmitt’s output, it has never been translated into English.
The purpose of this article is to provide such a translation with a description of its context.
…Schmitt’s article appeared on August 1, 1934, in a journal, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, of which he was the editor. By that time the murders were over and Schmitt had no reason to fear that he would be added to the list.