Schucking, Walther

(1875-1935)

   jurist, politician, and professor; a pacifist who served on The Hague's International Court of Justice. Born in Münster, he was raised in a family of scholars and took a doctorate in 1899 in international law and German legal history. He was named Privatdozent in 1900 at Breslau (now Poland's* Wroclaw) and was appointed ordentlicher Professor in 1903 at Marburg. Already a pacifist before World War I (and an advocate for Polish rights), he taught international law at Marburg until 1921 and then joined Berlin's* Handelshochschule. He directed Kiel's Institute for Interna-tional Law from 1926 until the NSDAP forced his retirement in 1933.

   Opposed to the legal positivism common before the war, Schücking applied ethical and social factors to international law. But while numerous antipositiv-ists, especially in the Weimar years, embraced authoritarianism, he believed that international understanding could only be realized through the democratization of the political process. In 1918, soon after publishing Die volkerrechtliche Lehre des Weltkrieges (The lesson of international law in the World War), he became chairman of the Reich Commission for the Examination of International Legal Complaints in the treatment of German war prisoners. A founder of the DDP and elected to the National Assembly,* he joined the peace delegation that traveled to France in April 1919. Repelled by the Versailles Treaty,* he sur-prised leftist friends by denouncing the settlement as a mockery of international justice.* In May 1921, however, he advised compliance with the terms of the London Ultimatum (see Reparations).

   Schücking returned to the Reichstag* in June 1920 and held his mandate until 1928. In 1930 he went to The Hague as a delegate to the Conference for the Codification of International Law; later that year he became a judge on the International Court and retained the office until his death.

   REFERENCES:Acker, Walther Schucking; Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Chickering, Imperial Germany.