"Once the criminal was identified, it was a simple matter to find out what his crime had been" - an interesting quote

A woman in a Nazi Germany "denounced her husband to the Nazis as a defeatist, in order to get him out of the way so that she could pursue a new love affair.  Her action was consistent with wartime Nazi law. But was that really "law"?  ...  Does a law have to be compatible with basic moral conceptions in order to be truly law?  Or is it enough that the body or person exercising control has said that is its or his will?"

Ingo Muller, "Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich", Harvard University Press, 1991, Introduction, p. xvii.

  E.T.A. Hoffman, a judge of the Prussian Supreme Court in the 19th century described the work of police investigations into "subversive activities" in his work "Master Flea":  "..a whole web of arbitrary acts, blatant disregard for the law, [and] personal animosity", id, p. 3.

The tale "Master Flea" describes an investigator who had the following opinion about what comes first - establishing that a person committed a crime or finding a person you want to pin a crime on and pin it:  "When reminded that, after all, a crime had to have been committed for there to be a criminal, Knarrpanti opined that once the criminal was identified, it was a simple matter to find out what his crime had been.  Only a superficial and careless judge would ... not be able to slip into the inquest some small lapse or other on the defendant's part that would justify the arrest", id., pp. 3-4.

Does all of that ring the bell, ladies and gentlemen?

If it does, you should be scared, you should take your heads out of the sand and make sure that your laws in your country can never be subverted the way described above.

Because the legal chimeras that the German legal scholar of the XIXth century described went out of control and grew to become the courts of the Nazi Germany that justified massive genocide by the Nazis.

Once the government starts on the slippery slope of pursuing a person and trying to "pin" upon that person anything the government can find to 'get" that person - and once the courts of that country justify this course of conduct, under various disguises and "legal doctrines' - there is nothing to prevent the slippery slope to further deteriorate into a situation where anything at all that the government does will be endorsed and "legalized" by the courts.

And what happens then, we know only too well from the history of the Nazi Germany.