Roland Freisler
Karl Roland Freisler was a German jurist, judge, and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1935 to 1942 and as president of the People's Court from 1942 to 1945. As a prominent ideologist of Nazism, he influenced as a jurist the Nazification of the German legal system. He was appointed president of the People's Court in 1942, overseeing the prosecution of political crimes as a judge. Freisler became known for his aggressive personality, his humiliation of defendants, and his frequent use of the death penalty in sentencing.
A law student at Kiel University, Freisler joined the Imperial German Army on the outbreak of the First World War and saw action on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded and taken prisoner of war by the Imperial Russian Army. On his return to Germany, he completed his law studies at the University of Jena and was awarded a Doctorate of Law in 1922. Freisler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, upon which he began defending Party members in court for acts of political violence.
After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Freisler was appointed State Secretary of the Prussian Ministry of Justice; two years later he became State Secretary in the unified Reich Ministry of Justice. Through his zealotry as well as his legal and verbal dexterity, he quickly established himself as the most feared judge in Nazi Germany and the personification of the Nazi ideology in domestic law. In 1942, representing Acting Reichsminister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger, Freisler attended the Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion.
In August 1942, Freisler succeeded Otto Georg Thierack as president of the People's Court. He presided over the show trials of the White Rose resistance group and perpetrators of the 20 July plot and handed out over 5,000 death sentences in his three-year tenure. Freisler was killed in February 1945 during an American bombing raid on Berlin. Although the death penalty was abolished with the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, Freisler's 1941 definition of murder in German law, as opposed to the less severe crime of manslaughter, survives in the Strafgesetzbuch § 211.
Early life
Roland Freisler was born on 30 October 1893 in Celle, Lower Saxony, the son of Julius Freisler, an engineer and teacher, and Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger. He was baptized as a Protestant on 13 December 1893. He had a younger brother, Oswald, who became a lawyer, and another brother who became a doctor. He attended the and received his Abitur in 1912, graduating at the top of his class.World War I
Freisler was attending law school at Kiel University upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which interrupted his studies. He saw active service in the German Imperial Army during the war after enlisting as a Fahnenjunker in 1914 with the 167th Infantry Regiment in Kassel, and by 1915 he was a Leutnant. While serving on the front-line with the 22nd Division, he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class, for heroism in action. In October 1915, he was wounded in action on the Eastern Front and taken as a prisoner of war by Imperial Russian forces.While a prisoner, Freisler learned to speak Russian and developed an interest in Marxism after the Russian Revolution had commenced. The Bolshevik provisional authority which took over responsibility for Freisler's prisoner of war camp made use of him as a camp "Commissar" administratively organizing the camp's food supplies from 1917 to 1918.
According to historian Georg Franz–Willig's Ursprung der Hitlerbewegung 3-volume set published by Schütz/Pr. Oldendorf in 1974, the SPD newspaper Vorwärts of 3 May 1924 ran an article titled "SPIRITUAL KINSHIP: JEWISH–COMMUNIST, POPULAR REICHSTAG CANDIDATE", in which it stated that Freisler had been "until rather recently a member of the German Communist Party" and that this was interesting because "his grandmother was a full Jewess". However, H. W. Koch states that there is no evidence that Freisler was of Jewish extraction, and that after the Russian Revolution the description "Commissar" was simply the title given to anyone employed in an administrative post in the prison camps and had no political connotations. He also states that Freisler was never a Communist, although in the early days of his Nazi Party career in the 1920s he was on the movement's left wing.
In the late 1930s, during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the Soviet Union, Freisler attended the Moscow Trials to watch the proceedings against the condemned. Freisler later rejected any insinuation that he had ever co-operated with the Soviets, the ideological nemesis of Nazi Germany, but rumours about his time as a "Commissar" with the "Reds" cast a shadow over his subsequent career as a political official in Germany.
Interwar legal and political career
Freisler returned to Germany in 1919 to complete his law studies at the University of Jena, and he qualified as a Doctor of Law in 1922. In 1924, he began working as an Assessor in Kassel and also was elected as a city councillor for the Völkisch-Social Bloc, an ultranationalist splinter party. He joined the Nazi Party in July 1925 and immediately gained a position of authority within the organisation by using his legal training to defend Party members and Sturmabteilung men who were regularly facing prosecutions for acts of political violence. As an early party member, or Alter Kämpfer, he would later be awarded the Golden Party Badge. From late 1925 to September 1927, Freisler was the Deputy Gauleiter in Gau Hessen-Nassau Nord under Walter Schultz. He was also a member of the Party's National Socialist Motor Corps, attaining the rank of NSKK-Brigadeführer in 1942.As the Nazis changed from a fringe political beer hall and street fighting movement into a political party, Freisler was elected to the Hesse-Nassau provincial Landtag, a position he held between 1930 and 1933. In 1931, he joined the Association of National Socialist German Legal Professionals, founded by fellow Nazi lawyer Hans Frank. He was elected to the Prussian Landtag in April 1932 serving until the Landtag was dissolved in October 1933. At the November 1933 German parliamentary election he was elected as a deputy of the Reichstag, retaining his seat until his death. Reelected in 1936 and 1938, he represented electoral constituencies 19, 13 and 35, respectively.
In 1927, Karl Weinrich, a Nazi member of the Prussian Landtag along with Freisler, characterised his reputation in the rapidly expanding Nazi movement in the late 1920s: "Rhetorically Freisler is equal to our best speakers, if not superior; particularly on the broad masses he has influence, but thinking people mostly reject him. Party Comrade Freisler is usable as only a speaker though and is unsuitable for any position of authority because of his unreliability and moodiness".
Career in Nazi Germany
In February 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Freisler was appointed Ministerial Director in the Prussian Ministry of Justice under Hans Kerrl. He was placed in charge of the personnel office and used his authority to force out Jewish members of the staff. By June, he was promoted to State Secretary in the Ministry. On 31 July, Prussian Minister president Hermann Göring appointed him to the recently reconstituted Prussian State Council. On the founding of the Academy for German Law by Hans Frank in October 1933, Freisler was made a member. He was the chairman of its Criminal Law Committee, head of its department of scientific studies and editor of the Academy newspaper. When the Prussian Ministry of Justice was merged with the Reich Ministry of Justice on 1 April 1935, Freisler became the State Secretary in the unified Ministry, where he served until August 1942.Freisler's mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity and verbal force, in combination with his zealous conversion to Nazi ideology, made him the most feared judge in Nazi Germany, and the personification of Nazism in domestic law. Despite his talents and loyalty, Adolf Hitler never appointed him to any post beyond the legal system. That might have been because he was a lone figure, lacking support within the senior echelons of the Nazi hierarchy but he had also been politically compromised by his brother, Oswald Freisler, also a lawyer. Oswald had acted as a defence counsel against the regime's authority several times during the increasingly politically driven trials by which the Nazis sought to enforce their control of German society and he had the habit of wearing his Nazi Party membership badge in court whilst doing so. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels reproached Oswald Freisler and reported his actions to Adolf Hitler who ordered Freisler's expulsion from the Party.
In 1941, in a discussion at the "Führer Headquarters" about whom to appoint to replace Franz Gürtner, the Reich Justice Minister, who had died, Goebbels suggested Freisler as an option; Hitler's reply, referring to Freisler's alleged "Red" past, was "That old Bolshevik? No!"
Contribution to the Nazification of the law
Freisler was a committed Nazi ideologist and used his legal skills to adapt its theories into practical law-making and judicature. He published a paper titled Die rassebiologische Aufgabe bei der Neugestaltung des Jugendstrafrechts. In this document he argued that "racially foreign, racially degenerate, racially incurable or seriously defective juveniles" should be sent to juvenile centres or correctional education centres and segregated from those who are "German and racially valuable".Freisler strongly advocated the creation of laws to punish Rassenschande, to be classed as "racial treason". Freisler looked to racist laws in the United States states as a model for Nazi legislation to target Jews in Germany. Freisler considered Jim Crow racist legislation "primitive" for failing to provide a legal definition of the term black or negro person. While some more conservative Nazi lawyers objected to the lack of precision with which a person could be defined as a "Jew," he argued that American judges were able to identify black people for purposes of laws in American states that prohibited "miscegenation" between black and white people and laws that otherwise codified racial segregation and German laws could similarly target Jews even if the term "Jew" could not be given a precise legal definition.
In 1933, Freisler published a pamphlet calling for the legal prohibition of "mixed-blood" sexual intercourse, which met with expressions of public unease in the dying elements of the German free press and non-Nazi political classes and lacked public authorization from the policy of the Nazi Party, which had only just obtained dictatorial control of the state. It also led to a clash with his superior Franz Gürtner but Freisler's ideological views reflected things to come, as was shown by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws within two years.
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". Between 1933 and 1945, the Reich's courts sentenced at least 72 German juveniles to death, among them 17-year-old Helmuth Hübener, found guilty of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets in 1942.
On the outbreak of World War II, Freisler issued a legal "Decree against National Parasites" introducing the term "perpetrator type", which was used in combination with another Nazi ideological term, "parasite". The adoption of racial biological terminology into law portrayed juvenile criminality as "parasitical", implying the need for harsher sentences to remedy it. He justified the new concept with: "in times of war, breaches of loyalty and baseness cannot find any leniency and must be met with the full force of the law".
On 8 July 1940, the Justice Ministry received a written complaint from Lothar Kreyssig, a senior local court judge protesting against the killings, described by the Nazi régime, of physically or mentally disabled persons including multiple individuals under the local judge's wardship. Freisler met with the local judge and explained that the ministry was in the process of establishing orderly procedures for the program with "expert committees" and "grievance councils"; notably, despite the absence thus far of promulgated procedures for adjudications under and implementation of the program, Freisler did not dispute the legality of the killings, instead arguing that the Nazi state had brought about a new concept of law. The local judge continued to protest, and some months later, after a second meeting with Reichsminister Gürtner reinforced Freisler's position, the local judge was forced to retire.
On 31 October 1941, Freisler issued a directive that Jewish inmates must wear the identifying yellow badge in Reich prisons. He also worked closely with the Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, on standardizing penalties for Jews and Poles in the occupied eastern territories. They concluded that the death penalty or concentration camp imprisonment, imposed by special courts-martial, were the only acceptable punishments for these categories of individuals, even for minor offenses. These penal regulations came into force in December 1941, and also were applied to Jews who were transported into the eastern territories.