The Nazi murder law that still exists.
The long arm of Nazi law reaches down even to our own times. The Third Reich might have been destroyed but its legislation on murder remains in force. Some of Germany's most eminent lawyers say it perpetuates injustice, and must be scrubbed out.
A surviving statute from 1941 means that women who kill their abusive husbands are more likely to be jailed for murder than husbands who beat their wives to death.
According to the German Association of Lawyers, the Nazis decided that a murderer was someone who killed "treacherously" or "sneakily" - "heimtueckisch" is the word in the law and it remains there today.
This means that a man who beats his wife over many years, finally killing her, is less likely to be convicted of murder, with a mandatory life sentence, than to be convicted of manslaughter, which may mean only five years in jail. The argument is that there was nothing "sneaky" or "treacherous" about the killing - it was frontal and direct and might have been expected.
Dr Stefan Koenig, a Berlin defence lawyer who chairs the Association of Lawyers' penal committee, says the Nazis defined murder in the light of their belief that some people were inherently weak-minded. It was about defining a murderer as someone treacherous rather than looking at the circumstances of each individual crime.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26047614
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