Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party, whose ideas on eugenics formed the basis Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the justification for Aktion T-4. His ideas helped to underpin Nazi attitudes of racial superiority.
He was born to a conservative Catholic family on July 5, 1874, in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany. He attended the Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg, and then he studied medicine and natural sciences at Freiburg University. In 1900, he qualified to teach anatomy and anthropology. Fischer was appointed to professorships at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg, and by 1906, he had won the Parisian Anthropological Society’s prestigious Broca Award for studies he had conducted on the skull width of Papuans from New Guinea.
In 1908, Fischer undertook a research expedition to study the Rehobother Basters in the German colony of South West Africa, to demonstrate the validity of the Mendelian heredity theory in man. The territory had been taken over by Germany in 1885, and the colonists treated the local Herero and Nama peoples very badly. In 1904, the Herero revolted, and by the time the Germans put down the revolt in 1907, 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama had been murdered. The Rehobother Basters, a mixed-race people from Hottentot women and white male colonists, had settled in the village of Rehoboth in the center of South West Africa.
Fischer concluded that the Basters were racially inferior because of the traits inherited from their nonwhite ancestors. His study also conducted unethical experiments on the Nama and Herero populations. His work concluded with a call to prevent a “mixed race” by the prohibition of mixed marriages such as those he had studied, arguing that the offspring should not continue to reproduce. His deeply flawed and unscientific research was accepted, and his recommendations were followed; by 1912, interracial marriage was prohibited throughout the German colonies. In 1913, Fischer published his field study results under the title The Rehobother Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation among Humans; this was the background for later racial debates and scientific support for the Nuremberg Laws.
Fischer became a leader in eugenics, the political and social movement that sought to improve society by preventing births of “inferior” groups while promoting births of “superior” people. He was appointed professor of anatomy and director of the Anatomical Institute in Freiburg in 1918. In 1921, he and two colleagues (Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz) published The Principles of Human Heredity, a text that became a yardstick in the field of eugenics. In 1924, a copy was presented to Adolf Hitler, who was in Landsberg Prison for his failed overthrow of the Bavarian government. Hitler embraced Fischer’s theories, incorporating them into his manifesto, Mein Kampf.
In 1927, Fischer took over as director of anthropology in the newly created Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI) in Berlin. At the same time, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was appointed as director of the Department of Human Genetics. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischer taught Nazi “racial hygiene” to SS doctors, an elite corps implementing racial policy. The KWI became integral to the development of Nazi biological racism.
In 1933, Fischer signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state, and Hitler appointed him rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin (now Humboldt University).
In 1935, Fischer and his colleagues from KWI and the German Ministry of the Interior discussed the issue of about 600 children in Nazi Germany who were descended from white German mothers and French African soldiers who had been deployed to the Rhineland as a result of the 1919 Versailles Treaty after World War I. Fischer’s work on mixed races in South West Africa was discussed, and Fischer advocated drastic measures to prevent the destruction of the superior Aryan race of pure-blooded Germans. In 1937, his call to sterilize these mixed-race children was implemented, and the children were brought into custody. While most were involuntarily sterilized, some were also sent for medical experimentation, and many died from these surgical procedures and subsequent infections.
Fischer put forth his view that natural reproduction was subject to economic constraints and that, for the health of the nation and the future, a “rationalization of births” was necessary. The Hadamar Clinic, a mental hospital in Hadamar, Germany, was used by the Nazi government as the site of Aktion T-4, the Nazi euthanasia program for the “incurably sick,” which was strongly associated with eugenics and the racial-hygiene theories put forward by Lenz and Fischer and by its director, Otmar von Verschuer.
In June 1939, Fischer spoke to Ruhr coal magnates regarding the forthcoming war. To promote the goals of Nazism, he emphasized the danger of Jews and Africans, and he called for the magnates’ support to protect the purity of the German race.
Fischer officially joined the Nazi Party in 1940. He developed the physical descriptions used to dictate racial origins, creating the so-called Fischer-Saller scale. He and his team experimented on Roma and African Germans, taking blood and measuring skulls to find scientific validation for his theories. In 1940, Fischer decided to publish a book on his personal antisemitic philosophy. To supplement the text with images, he sent his assistant to the newly established Łódź ghetto to photograph the Jewish residents there.
As Germany continued the mass murder of Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union through the late summer and spring of 1941, Fischer was the guest speaker at the inaugural meeting of the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. The agenda focused on the annihilation of European Jews, and the discussions concluded that the “total solution to the Jewish question” was extermination through forced labor.
Fischer retired as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin in 1942. Shortly afterward, he received a huge grant to study twins and to determine the importance of heredity over environment. He appointed his protégé, von Verschuer, to lead the study. Newly appointed as director at KWI, Verschuer engaged his former graduate student Josef Mengele to continue the twin research. Mengele was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1943 and there conducted pseudoscientific experiments on Jewish and Roma twins and dwarves.
In June 1944, Fischer chaired the Anti-Jewish Congress in Kraków, Poland.
Shortly after the war ended, Fischer was denazified; he returned to Freiberg University, and in 1952, he was appointed honorary president of the German Anthropological Society. He was not prosecuted as a war criminal. To avoid publicizing German medical atrocities and the public finding that the entire medical community could no longer be trusted, the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial presented medical researchers as having been “perverted” by the manipulative control of the SS and as poisoned by Nazism. It was also alleged that the human experiments were so ill conceived as not to be worthy of the status of science. Therefore, it was concluded that the ties of the German medical community—especially those at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes—were not in any way associated with the death camps. The SS and medical personnel, such as Mengele, who were directly involved with the death camps were identified as those most responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.
After the war, Eugen Fischer completed his memoirs, which concealed his role as the justifier of the genocidal program of the Third Reich. He died in Freiburg, on July 9, 1967.
Hans Frank, a German lawyer who worked for the Nazi Party during the 1920s and 1930s and became Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer, served as governor-general of occupied Poland and later earned the nickname the “Butcher of Poland.”
Hans Michael Frank was born on May 23, 1900, in Karlsruhe, to Karl and Magdalena Frank. After completing high school, in 1917, he enlisted in the German army, too late to experience extensive combat. In 1919 and 1920, he served in the occultist Thule Society, a rightist group focused on ancient German culture. Frank also served also in the Freikorps under Franz Ritter von Epp, which battled communists and other “enemies of Germany.” From this base, Frank took part in the defeat by the Freikorps of the communist Munich Republic on May 3, 1919.
In 1919, together with other members of the Thule Society, he joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), which soon mutated into the NSDAP. In September 1923, Frank became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA); a month later, he joined the NSDAP. Frank took part in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, an unsuccessful coup intended to serve the same function as Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome. When this failed, Frank fled to Austria, returning in Munich in 1924, after the Bavarian government shelved pending charges upon Adolf Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg Prison.
Frank had been studying law and passed his final state examination in 1926. He quickly developed an important profile in the NSDAP because of his legal skills and commitment to party ideals. In 1928, he founded the National Association of German Jurists, with himself as president. As the Nazis rose to power, he became Adolf Hitler’s personal legal adviser. He also served as the party’s lawyer, representing it in over 2,400 cases. In September to October 1930, he served as the defense attorney at the court-martial in Leipzig of three army officers charged with membership in the NSDAP. The trial was a media sensation. Hitler testified in person; the defense successfully put the Weimar Republic itself on trial. Many army officers were sympathetic to the NSDAP as a result.
Also in 1930, Frank was elected to the Reichstag. After Hitler’s ascent to office as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Frank was appointed minister of justice for Bavaria, at the same time becoming president of the Academy of German Law. Frank’s adherence to the law and its proper implementation found him initially at odds with Hitler, as Frank opposed not only the extrajudicial murders at Dachau concentration camp but, more importantly, Hitler’s elimination of rivals, including Ernst Röhm, during the Night of the Long Knives, from June 30 to July 2, 1934.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the country was split into three sectors. The western third was annexed directly to the Third Reich, and the eastern third was taken by the Soviet Union. The central third, of roughly 90,000 square kilometers, was made into the Generalgouvernement, a semi-independent administrative unit. On October 26, 1939, following the end of the invasion of Poland, Hans Frank was appointed governor-general of what remained as occupied Poland. As the chief regional administrator, he obtained the cooperation of Hermann Göring in economic matters, but the SS, under Odilo Globocnik, implemented the murder of Jews. The area became a depot for non-Aryan races providing endless slave labor and a site for mass extermination of European Jews.
The Generalgouvernement seemed to offer room for German population growth, but first the Polish nationals and the several million Jews who lived in the area had to be cleared. In a speech on December 16, 1941, Frank said,
We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will take measures that will somehow lead to successful destruction; and this in connection with large-scale procedures which are to be discussed in the Reich, the Government-General must become as free of Jews as the Reich. . . . We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich.
Frank oversaw the segregation of Jews into ghettos, especially the enormous Warsaw ghetto, and into the Bełżec, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Sobibór extermination camps. Frank was responsible for the exploitation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians, including their use of forced labor. Frank administered the destruction of Poland as a national entity with the murder of the country’s leaders, educated elite, and clergy, and the extermination of nearly all Poland’s Jews.
In 1942, he lost his positions of authority outside the Generalgouvernement after annoying Hitler with a series of speeches in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich that openly criticized SS policies and racial issues. He was also involved in a power struggle with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the head of the SS and the police in the Generalgouvernement. Krüger himself was ultimately replaced by Wilhelm Koppe. Hitler removed Frank from his NDSAP roles but would not permit him to resign from his rank of governor-general, which Frank retained until he was forced to take flight from the advancing Soviet army.
Fleeing the Allies at the end of the war, Frank was arrested by American troops on May 3, 1945, at Tegernsee, Bavaria. Initially beaten, he twice attempted suicide. He stood trial at Nuremberg before the International Military Tribunal, and as an aid to his defense, he willingly turned over the 43 volumes of his diaries. The charges against him were numerous: he held a position of leadership in the Nazi Party and in the German government; he promoted the seizure of power by the Nazis through his maneuvering in the field of law; as governor-general of Poland, he committed war crimes and crimes against humanity; he advocated and administered a program of exterminating Jews; and he imposed upon the population of the Generalgouvernement a reign of terror, oppression, impoverishment, and starvation.
Frank was found guilty on counts three and four (war crimes and crimes against humanity) and was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946.
Kurt Franz was an SS officer known to be a cruel and sadistic commander of the Treblinka extermination camp. He was a major perpetrator of genocide during the Holocaust and one of the many concentration camp officers who were initially part of the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program.
Kurt Hubert Franz was born on January 17, 1914, into a Catholic family in Düsseldorf. His father, a merchant, died early, and his mother remarried a man with a strong nationalistic outlook. From 1920 to 1928, Franz attended school and then trained as a cook, without completing his final examination. He joined several right-wing nationalist groups and served in the voluntary labor corps.
Franz joined the Nazi Party in 1932. He enlisted in the German army in 1935 and served in the kitchen of an artillery regiment. Discharged in October 1937, he joined the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head unit), training at Weimar. He then started as a cook and guard at nearby Buchenwald concentration camp, where he rose to the rank of SS-Unterscharführer.
In late 1939, Franz worked in Adolf Hitler’s chancellery. In the later part of 1941, he was assigned to cook at the Aktion T-4 euthanasia headquarters. On April 20, 1942, he was promoted to SS-Oberscharführer, and later that spring, he was posted to Lublin in the Generalgouvernement. Sent to the Bełżec extermination camp, where he stayed until the end of August 1942, Franz worked as a cook, at the same time training the Ukrainian guards there.
In September 1942, Franz was transferred to Treblinka extermination camp, where, on the orders of Christian Wirth, he became deputy commandant. Franz’s initial duties at Treblinka were overseeing work commandos, receiving transports, and moving Jews from the undressing rooms to the gas chambers. He became the main supervisor in day-to-day contact with prisoners at Treblinka and turned out to be the most dreaded guard there because of his brutality.
Franz made his rounds of the camp together with his St. Bernard dog, Barry, who was trained to follow Franz’s command. Because of the dog’s size, the target area when biting prisoners was invariably their genitalia or buttocks. When Franz was not there to give such orders to the dog, the dog permitted prisoners to pet and even tease him, without harming anyone.
In early 1943, after a selection for the gas chambers, Franz found three babies left by their mothers. It was observed that he lifted one of the children off the ground, kicked him in the air, and watched as his head split against the wall. Franz frequently enjoyed kicking and killing babies from the arriving transports. He especially enjoyed shooting with his pistol or hunting rifle at prisoners or those newly arriving. An expert at flogging prisoners, Franz never hit fewer than 25 or 50 lashes, which he carried out slowly and with great satisfaction.
Franz reviewed the prisoner roll call and took part in meting out the punishments. Once, when 7 prisoners had attempted to escape, Franz had them all shot; he then ordered a roll call and announced that any future attempted escapes would be dealt with by shooting 10 prisoners for every successful escapee.
Franz was also responsible for teaching “the Treblinka song” to those Jews in the Sonderkommando—those who were made to work in the crematoria instead of being immediately executed. They were tasked to memorize the entire song by nighttime on their first day at the camp and were ordered to sing the song as new transports were unloading and prisoners were going through the process of undressing.
From August 1943 to November 1943, Franz oversaw the end of Aktion Reinhard. During September and October 1943, the Jews did the physical work of dismantling Treblinka; and after this was done, some 30 to 50 were sent to dismantle Sobibór. The rest were shot and cremated on Franz’s orders.
In late autumn 1943, Franz was transferred to Trieste as part of a major redeployment on the orders of the primary manager of the three Aktion Reinhard death camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka), Odilo Globocnik. Shortly after September 8, 1943, Franz, together with Christian Wirth and others, reached Trieste. Under Globocnik, they transformed an old rice mill on the fringe of Trieste into a prison center complete with a crematorium. It was known as Risiera di San Sabba. At San Sabba, thousands of Italian Jews, resistance members, and political dissidents were tortured and then murdered.
Franz was imprisoned by U.S. forces at the end of the war but escaped. Initially, he found work as a laborer until 1949, prior to reverting to his former occupation as a cook. He then worked in Düsseldorf for 10 years, until, on December 2, 1959, he was arrested and imprisoned after a search of his house found a photo album of Treblinka entitled “Beautiful Years.”
In 1965, Franz was tried for the crimes he committed at Treblinka. He denied all the charges brought against him. He was found guilty of participating in the murder of at least 300,000 people as well as 35 specific counts of murder and attempted murder and was given a life sentence on September 3, 1965. Released from prison in 1993, he died on July 4, 1998, aged 84, in a senior citizen’s home in Wuppertal.
Roland Freisler was a preeminent lawyer and judge who served as president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) in Nazi Germany from August 20, 1942, until his death on February 3, 1945, in Berlin. In this capacity, Freisler headed the show trials used by the Nazis to deal with opponents of the National Socialist regime and political dissent. Acting as judge, jury, and sometimes even as prosecutor, he handed down the death penalty or life imprisonment in 90 percent of all cases that came before him. While he presided over the First Senate of the People’s Court, he was responsible for as many death sentences as all other sessions of the court put together for the entire time it existed.
Freisler contributed to the introduction into German law of racial categories and differential treatment based on race. In addition, he was responsible for the first laws allowing for the execution of juveniles in Germany. He was more extreme in his adherence to principles of racial purity than Adolf Hitler, arguing for a ban on any sort of mixed-blood intercourse or relationships, no matter how little “foreign blood” might be involved. He represented the Reich Ministry of Justice at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when the plans of the Final Solution were outlined.
Freisler was born on October 30, 1893, in Celle, Lower Saxony, and was baptized a Protestant on December 13, 1893. In 1914, he was at law school at the University of Jena when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies. He served as an officer cadet in 1914, and by 1915, he was a lieutenant. He won the Iron Cross First and Second Class for heroism in action. Wounded on the Eastern Front, in October 1915, he was captured by Russian forces. As a prisoner of war, he learned Russian and is reputed to have developed an interest in Marxism following the Russian Revolution. After the war, he returned to Germany with the reputation of being a convinced communist, something he always later denied. His subsequent career as a political official in Germany, however, was overshadowed by rumors about his possible communist past.
In 1919, he resumed his law studies and became a doctor of law in 1922. From 1924, he worked as a solicitor in Kassel. He was also elected a city councilor as a member of the Völkisch-Sozialer Block, an extreme nationalist splinter party.
Freisler joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in July 1925 as part of the movement’s left wing and served as defense counsel for party members who were regularly facing prosecutions for acts of political violence. As the Nazis transitioned from a fringe political beer-hall and street-fighting movement into a more formal political entity, Freisler was elected for the party to the Prussian Landtag and later became a member of the Reichstag.
In February 1933, after the Nazi takeover of Germany, Freisler was appointed director of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. He served there from 1933 to 1934 and then in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942. Known to be interested in the procedures of Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor of the Soviet purge trials, Freisler watched Vyshinsky’s performances when he had been engaged in Soviet show trials in Moscow in 1938.
In October 1939, Freisler introduced the concept of “precocious juvenile criminal” in the Juvenile Felons Decree. This provided the legal basis for imposing the death penalty and penitentiary terms on juveniles for the first time in German legal history. From the period 1933 to 1945, the Reich’s courts sentenced at least 72 German juveniles to death.
Despite Freisler’s mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity and verbal force, and zealous conversion to National Socialist ideology, Adolf Hitler never appointed him to a government post beyond the legal system. This might have been attributable to the fact of his being politically compromised through family association with his brother Oswald Freisler, who was also a lawyer. Oswald, who had a habit of wearing his Nazi Party membership badge in court, had appeared as the defense counsel in court against the regime’s authority several times in its program of increasingly politically driven trials with which it sought to enforce its control of German society. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels reproved Oswald Freisler and reported his actions to Hitler, who in response ordered Oswald’s expulsion from the party. Oswald Freisler committed suicide in 1939.
On January 20, 1942, Freisler, representing the Reich justice minister Franz Schlegelberger, attended the Wannsee Conference of senior governmental officials to provide expert legal advice in planning the destruction of European Jewry. Then on August 20, 1942, Hitler named Freisler as president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). The court had jurisdiction over a broad array of “political offenses,” viewed by Freisler as destruction of the defensive capability of the Nazi state. The accused brought before him were accordingly punished severely, and death penalty was meted out in most cases.
Freisler became infamous for the aggressive way he presided during trials, aiming at total humiliation of the defendants. He became notorious for insulting and abusing defendants in a highly personalized fashion from the bench, often shouting at the steady stream of defendants passing before him on their way to their deaths—particularly in cases of resistance to the authority of Nazi Germany. His speech would become shrill, although in his rages he ensured that he controlled his voice for dramatic purposes, using a mastery of the art of courtroom performance. This practice earned him the nickname “Raving Roland.”
The People’s Court almost always agreed with the prosecution. In 90 percent of all cases, the court’s verdict was the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison. The number of death sentences rose sharply under Freisler’s tenure, and being brought before it was equivalent to a death sentence. Under Freisler’s management, the Volksgerichtshof sent more than 5,000 Germans to their death without a fair trial.
Some Volksgerichtshof hearings under Freisler moved at an astonishing pace. In February 1943, he presided over the trial of three Munich University students who belonged to the dissident White Rose group. On February 22, 1943, 21-year-old Sophie Scholl; her 22-year-old brother, Hans Scholl; and 24-year-old Christof Probst were arrested for distributing antiwar leaflets at the university four days earlier. Brought before Freisler, they were tried and found guilty in less than an hour, without evidence being presented or arguments made by either side. The three were guillotined just six hours after their arrest.
Another of Friesler’s victims was a Catholic priest, Joseph Müller, who told a political joke. The joke itself did not bring about Müller’s conviction. His work with youth raised Nazi ire, as his teachings contradicted Nazi dogma. Throughout the trial, Freisler ranted and raved, even helping witnesses find appropriate words of scorn. He screamed accusations of collusion, hostility, and intentional undermining of the German people’s will to carry on the war. Müller was sentenced to death and guillotined on September 11, 1944. His family received a bill for the cost of the execution.
Freisler’s most notorious case came in the wake of the failed July 20, 1944, coup attempt against the Nazi regime. The trials began in the People’s Court on August 7, 1944, with Freisler presiding. The first eight men accused were Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Paul von Hase, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, Helmuth Stieff, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Klausing, and Albrecht von Hagen. All were condemned to death by hanging, and the sentences were carried out at Berlin’s Plötzensee prison within two hours of the verdicts being passed.
The way that Freisler humiliated the July 20 coup conspirators in his courtroom—bellowing at them nonstop and denying them the right to wear belts or suspenders so that their trousers fell—prompted even members of Hitler’s entourage to recommend that his authority be curtailed. The accused were unable to consult their lawyers, who were not seated near them. None of them could address the court at length, and Freisler interrupted any attempts to do so.
On February 3, 1945, during a Saturday session of the People’s Court, American Eighth Air Force bombers attacked Berlin. Government and Nazi Party buildings were hit, including the Reich Chancellery, the Gestapo headquarters, the Party Chancellery, and the People’s Court.
According to one report, Freisler adjourned court and ordered that the day’s prisoners be taken to a shelter, but he paused to gather files. No one is quite sure how he died. Some witnesses claim that he was crushed to death by falling masonry, while others claim that he bled to death outside of the bombed courthouse. His body was found crushed beneath a fallen masonry column, clutching the files he had retrieved. Among those files was that of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a July 20 bomb-plot member who was on trial that day and was facing execution. Freisler’s death saved Schlabrendorff, who, after the war, became a judge of the Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Freisler is interred in the plot of his wife’s family at the Waldfriedhof Dahlem cemetery in Berlin. His name is not shown on the gravestone.
Wilhelm Frick, a prominent German Nazi politician who served as Reich minister of the interior in Adolf Hitler’s cabinet from 1933 to 1943, was responsible for Nazifying Germany during the initial years of the dictatorship by putting in place legislation that implemented Nazi racial policy and removed Jewish citizens from public life, abolished political parties, and sent political dissidents to concentration camps. From August 1943, Frick was also the protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
He was born on March 12, 1877, in Alsenz, Rheinland-Pfalz, the youngest of four children of teacher Wilhelm Frick and his wife Henriette. Frick completed high school in Kaiserslautern in 1896 and studied law between 1896 and 1900 at Göttingen, Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1901. From 1900, he served as an administrator, and in 1903, he passed the examination for admission to the Bavarian civil service. In 1904, he was appointed as a public prosecutor in the Munich Police Department. In 1910, Frick married Elizabetha Emile Nagel, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Their marriage ended in an ugly divorce in 1934. He was rejected as unfit for service during World War I.
In 1919, Frick took over the leadership of the Political Police in Munich. Using the powers of his new office to support radical right-wing groups, Frick offered members of Freikorps, who committed political killings, the opportunity to escape. In February 1923, Frick became head of the Munich Criminal Police. In close contact with Adolf Hitler, he became Hitler’s liaison man at Munich Police Headquarters, and on November 8 to 9, 1923, while still director of the Munich Criminal Police, Frick took part in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed effort to seize power. Frick was arrested along with others; tried for treason in 1924, he was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment and dismissed from his police post. He avoided prison, however, when the far-right National Socialist Freedom Party picked him as a representative to the Reichstag. He was duly elected in May 1924, where he continued to serve from that point onward as leader of the National Socialist group in the assembly.
Wilhelm Frick served as Reich minister of the interior between 1933 and 1943. Particularly in the early years of the Third Reich he laid the foundations for Hitler’s dictatorship and oversaw the persecution of political opponents and Jews. In this image, Frick is greeting officers in newly annexed Austria in 1938. (Library of Congress)
On January 23, 1930, Frick was appointed as minister of the interior in Thuringia with responsibility for education, and in this capacity, he founded a chair for racial research at the University of Jena. Frick also used his power as the first National Socialist minister in a provincial government to dismiss communist and Social Democratic officials and to rid the Thuringian police force of officials who supported the Weimar Republic, replacing them with Nazis. He proscribed several newspapers, banned the antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front, and forbade the playing of jazz music. Rampant antisemitic propaganda flourished. Frick organized special German freedom prayers to be said in Thuringian schools, which lauded the Volk, national honor, and military might while at the same time decried “traitors.”
Using his influence as interior minister, Frick granted Hitler German citizenship, applying a law that extended citizenship to anyone appointed to a German official position by naming Hitler as a councilor for the state of Braunschweig. Frick was removed from office by a Social Democratic motion of no confidence in the Thuringian Landtag Parliament on April 1, 1931, but he remained in the Reichstag as a member of the NDSAP.
After Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, he appointed Frick as minister of the interior, a key position he held until August 1943. In this role, he had direct responsibility for many measures taken against Jews, communists, Social Democrats, and other opponents of the regime. He also had control over drafting and implementing the laws that gradually eliminated Jews from the German economy and public life, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws on Race, which reduced Jews to second-class status. Frick was one of only three Nazis in the original Hitler cabinet; Hitler was chancellor, and Hermann Göring was minister without portfolio. Initially Frick had no authority over the police, as law enforcement had been previously a state and local matter.
Frick’s power grew owing to his involvement in the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933. Already in July 1933, he had implemented the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring including forced sterilizations, which later culminated in the killings of the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program supported by his ministry. He was responsible for drafting many of the Gleichschaltung (coordination) regulations that consolidated the Nazi regime. Under the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich, which centralized authority throughout Germany, the state governors became responsible to his office. In 1935, Frick was granted sole power to appoint the mayors of all municipalities with populations greater than 100,000, except for Berlin and Hamburg, where Hitler reserved the right to appoint the mayors.
It was Frick who framed the extraordinary law that declared all Hitler’s actions during the Blood Purge of the SA in June 1934 to be legal. Frick was responsible for many of the prewar antisemitic laws, such as the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. Frick took a leading part in Germany’s rearmament and drafted laws introducing universal military conscription, both in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and extending the Wehrmacht military-service law to Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, as well as to the regions of Czechoslovakia annexed under the Munich Agreement. When the various countries to be incorporated into the Reich were invaded, Frick was placed at the head of the central departments responsible for these incorporations.
From the mid-to-late 1930s, Frick lost favor within the Nazi Party after a power struggle involving attempts to resolve a lack of coordination within the Reich government. For example, in 1933, he tried to restrict the widespread use of protective custody (Schutzhaft) orders used to send people to concentration camps, only to be overridden by Heinrich Himmler. Although nominally Himmler’s superior, Frick failed to impose any legal limitations on the power of the Gestapo and the SS; nor did he seriously interfere with their encroachment on his area of jurisdiction. His power was greatly reduced in 1936, when Hitler named Himmler chief of all German police forces. This effectively united the police with the SS and made it independent of Frick’s control, since Himmler was responsible only to Hitler. A long-running power struggle between the two culminated in Frick being replaced by Himmler as interior minister in 1943.
On August 24, 1943, Frick succeeded Himmler when he was appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, a position he held until the end of the war, although real authority was concentrated in the hands of his subordinate Karl-Hermann Frank. In this role, Frick oversaw and approved the pillaging of the Protectorate, the execution of hostages, and other punishments that took place up until the end of the war. In Prague, Frick used ruthless methods to counter dissent. Frick was captured in May 1945 and tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. For his role in formulating the Enabling Act as minister of the interior and the later Nuremberg Laws, he was convicted of planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. He was also found guilty of crimes against humanity committed in concentration camps in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He was sentenced to death and was hanged at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946.