Overhaul champion Rothman sparks hubbub with claim courts helped Hitler

Speaking at a high-profile legal conference, lawmaker Simcha Rothman ignites something of a furor by claiming that courts helped put Adolf Hitler in power.

“When Hitler rose to power in Germany he didn’t burn the courthouses, he burned the parliament because parliaments are always the enemy of dictators. The courts helped him,” Rothman says at the Israel Bar Association’s annual conference in Tel Aviv.

Rothman, a lawyer and Religious Zionism MK, is widely seen as one of the main proponents and architects of the government’s paused effort to overhaul Israel’s legal system by shifting power away from the courts and diluting their role as a check on government power.

According to the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial, after Hitler rose to power in 1933 he reformed the courts to align them with Nazi goals, essentially using a bastardized version of Germany’s judicial system to pass various anti-Jewish laws, before creating a special People’s Court to tighten control over the system. “The People’s Court became part of the Nazi system of terror, condemning tens of thousands of people as ‘Volk Vermin’ and thousands more to death for ‘Volk Treason,'” according to the USHMM.