Matias Ristic

Matias studied and graduated in law at the University of Cologne, Germany, and in parallel completed studies in piano and violin at the conservatory in Cologne as a concert violinist.
Since his first semester Matias had already been working at the University of Cologne, beginning at the Institute for Intellectual Property and Copyright Law, which was directed by the current rector of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Prof. Dr. Anja Steinbeck, and whose later assistant he became. This was followed by an employment in a major international law office based in Frankfurt – his dissertation, which was in its final stages at that time, dealt on an international treaty influencing trademark law, but was coincided with the so-called Detmold Auschwitz Trial, which Matias initially followed out of historical interest. This interest strengthened and intensified especially with the day, Matias met and began an ongoing dialogue with Prof. Dr. Cornelius Nestler, today university professor emeritus of rights and counsel for Jewish victims and their relatives in criminal proceedings. This, finally, induced Matias, after further involvement with the so-called concentration-camp-trials, to shift his scientific research solely towards focusing on the field of Nazi injustice and its judicial reappraisal, accompanied by the philosophy of law, but also including the disciplines of sociology and psychology, which have been and are still neglected in the legal sciences. From 2019-2022 Matias worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law (University of Cologne) under Prof. Nestler's direction. After Nestler's retirement in 2022, Matias still continued to work there under the successor Prof. Dr. Anja Schiemann until September 2022, when he has taken over the project coordination of the "Post-Holocaust Remedies Project" supported and financed by the Foundation “Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft” (“Remembrance, Responsibility, Future”) at the Justus Liebig University Giessen under the direction of head of project, Prof. Dr. Thilo Marauhn. Here Matias can combine in a practically relevant way, among other things, findings from his "new" dissertation, which is supervised by Prof. Nestler and in which Matias devotes himself to a biographical study of the work of the presiding judge in the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965), Hans Hofmeyer. Among other things, the study examines possible consequential effects and influences of this particular judge as (dis)continuous legal views before 1933, until 1945, and after World War II. The work, which is well advanced, has already brought new findings to the public, including the fact that Hofmeyer himself was deeply involved in Nazi justice and, for example, began his career as a judge at a so called Erbgesundheitsgericht (freely: “hereditary health court”) and was responsible for at least five forced sterilizations of infants at this court. It can be expected that this work will provide even more in-depth and globally effective insights, which could sometimes be capable of questioning the core of common, taken-for-granted patterns of interpretation of German "reappraisal“.