How can justice mutate into injustice? How can law turn into an instrument of state terror? In this groundbreaking book, Herlinde Pauer-Studer probes the normative foundations of Nazism and the totalitarian "Führer state". By examining criminal law, police law, and the murderous implementation of National Socialist racial ideology, she shows how a rule of law state became a criminal one. In doing so, she uncovers the conditions necessary to protect a legal system against ideological moralization and systemic corruption.