Judicial independence

Was a judge who lived in Nazi Germany more attuned to improper pressure?

Serving judges normally keep their private lives firmly locked away, together with their personal opinions. When they retire and write their memoirs, they often find it difficult to open up. Despite everything that Sir Konrad Schiemann tells us about a family background that was unique for a member of the English judiciary, he spills few beans in his recently published autobiography. But there was one brief vignette that I found particularly telling.

Schiemann was born in Berlin in 1937. By 1946 he was an orphan, sent to England to be raised by the family of his uncle Professor Werner von Simson, who had left Germany in 1939. The young Schiemann went to school in Birmingham; served in the British army; read law at Cambridge; was called to the bar; and eventually became a lord justice of appeal. From 2004 to 2012, he was the UK judge at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Front cover (left): Schiemann aged 7; Schiemann as a judge of the Court of Appeal Back cover (right): Eduard von Simson; Schiemann as a judge of the European Court

Schiemann’s self-published book is called A Dual Perspective: the German in an English Judge. It is well produced but it would have been easier to follow if the author had provided an index and a family tree.

On his father’s side, a grandfather joined the Nazi party in the 1930s and a great-aunt was honoured by Israel for helping Jews during the war. His mother thought she would be shot for her friendship with the plotters who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, though in the end she died of pneumonia. His father was killed by a sniper during the Allied advance, two weeks before Germany surrendered.

A great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Eduard von Simson, president of five German parliaments and of Germany’s supreme court. Born into a Jewish family in Königsberg,¹ von Simson was christened as a child and later converted to Christianity — as did his parents. Schiemann is clearly very proud of his formerly-Jewish ancestor, though he says there was “no trace of specifically Jewish beliefs or practices in his [own] upbringing”.

He was sworn in as a High Court judge in 1986 by Lord Hailsham. The lord chancellor invited Schiemann’s wife, daughter and uncle to the ceremony at the House of Lords. “The thing we have always liked about Konrad is that he has never changed his name,” Hailsham told them in an attempt to break the ice.

Von Simson replied with what I take to be a reference to the Mountbatten family, originally known as Battenberg. Wouldn’t it have been rather presumptuous of Kornad to have changed his name, his uncle suggested. “After all, he is not a member of the royal family.”

At this, Hailsham is said to have rocked back in his chair like someone who’d received an electric shock. Schiemann thought this was not a promising start to his his judicial career.

But the vignette I referred to earlier comes from 1998, when Lord Irvine of Lairg was living in the lord chancellor’s residence and Schiemann was sitting in the Court of Appeal.