Roland Freisler facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Roland Freisler
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Freisler in 1942
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| Judge President of the People's Court | |
| In office 20 August 1942 – 3 February 1945 |
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| Chancellor | Adolf Hitler |
| Preceded by | Otto Thierack |
| Succeeded by | Wilhelm Crohne (acting) Harry Haffner |
| State Secretary Reich Ministry of Justice |
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| In office 1 April 1935 – 20 August 1942 |
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| Minister | Franz Gürtner |
| Preceded by | Position created |
| Succeeded by | Curt Rothenberger |
| Additional positions | |
| 1933–1935 | State Secretary, Prussian Justice Ministry |
| 1933–1945 | Prussian State Council |
| 1933–1945 | Reichstag |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 30 October 1893 Celle, Hanover Province, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire |
| Died | 3 February 1945 (aged 51) Berlin, Free State of Prussia, Nazi Germany |
| Resting place | Waldfriedhof Dahlem, Berlin, Germany |
| Political party | Nazi Party |
| Other political affiliations |
Völkisch-Social Bloc |
| Spouse |
Marion Russegger
(m. 1928) |
| Relations | Oswald Freisler (brother) |
| Children | 2 |
| Alma mater | University of Jena |
| Profession | Judge, lawyer |
| Civilian awards | Golden Party Badge |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  German Empire |
| Branch/service | Prussian Army |
| Years of service | 1914–1918 |
| Rank | Leutnant |
| Unit | 167th Infantry Regiment (1st Upper Alsatian) 22nd Division |
| Battles/wars | World War I |
| Military awards | Iron Cross, 2nd class |
Karl Roland Freisler (30 October 1893 – 3 February 1945) was a German jurist, judge and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 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 Germany's legal system. He attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion. He was appointed President of the People's Court in 1942, overseeing the prosecution of political crimes as a judge, and became known for his aggressive personality, his humiliation of defendants, and frequent use of the death penalty in sentencing.
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.
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Early life
Roland Freisler was born on 30 October 1893 in Celle, Lower Saxony, the son of Julius Freisler (b. 1862 in Klantendorf, Moravia), an engineer and teacher, and Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger (1863–1932). 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 Wilhelmsgymnasium Kassel 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 (officer cadet) in 1914 with the 167th Infantry Regiment (1st Upper Alsatian) in Kassel, and by 1915 he was a Leutnant. While serving in 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 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 "Commissar" (as he was described by them in his repatriated prisoner of war paperwork in 1918) 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, 1974, the SDP newspaper Vorwärts of 3 May 1924 ran an article entitled 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." Another possibility is that after the Russian Revolution the description "Commissar" was merely an administrative title given by the Bolshevik authority for anyone employed in an administrative post in the prison camps without the political connotations that the title later acquired. However, in the early days of his Nazi Party career in the 1920s, Freisler was a part of 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 his subsequent career as a political official in Germany was overshadowed by rumours about his time as a "Commissar" with the "Reds".
Post-war 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. From 1924, he worked 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 (membership number 9,679) and gained authority immediately within the organisation by using his legal training to defend Party members and SA 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 (NSKK), attaining the rank of NSKK-Brigadeführer in 1942. As the Party transitioned from a fringe political beer hall and street fighting movement into a political party, Freisler was elected to the Hesse-Nassau provincial Landtag from 1930 to 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 (Hesse-Nassau), 13 (Schleswig-Holstein) and 35 (Mecklenburg), 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, Friesler 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. However, 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 tyrannical 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, in response, 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 Roland 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 entitled Die rassebiologische Aufgabe bei der Neugestaltung des Jugendstrafrechts ("The racial-biological task involved in the reform of juvenile criminal law"). 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 looked to racist laws in the United States states as a model for Nazi legislation to target Jews in Germany.
On the outbreak of World War II, Freisler issued a legal "Decree against National Parasites" (September 1939) 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.
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.
Wannsee Conference
On 20 January 1942, Freisler, representing Acting Reichsminister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger, attended the Wannsee Conference of senior governmental officials in a villa on the southwestern outskirts of Berlin to provide expert legal advice for the planning of the destruction of European Jewry. The official minutes of the conference do not record any comments by Freisler. However, he had a history of antisemitism and was certainly aware that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the extermination of the Jews.
Presidency of the People's Court
On 20 August 1942, Hitler promoted Otto Georg Thierack to Reich Justice Minister, replacing the retiring Schlegelberger, and named Freisler to succeed Thierack as president of the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof). This court had jurisdiction over a broad array of political offences, including black marketeering, work slowdowns and defeatism. These actions were viewed by Freisler as Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining defensive capability) and were punished severely. The People's Court under Freisler's domination almost always sided with the prosecuting authority, to the point that being brought before it was tantamount to a capital charge. Its separate administrative existence beyond the ordinary judicial system, despite its trappings, rapidly turned it into an executive execution arm and psychological domestic terror weapon of Nazi Germany's totalitarian regime, in the tradition of a revolutionary tribunal rather than a court of law.
He chaired the First Senate of the People's Court wearing a blood scarlet judicial robe, in a hearing chamber bedecked with scarlet swastika-draped banners and a large black sculpted bust of Adolf Hitler's head upon a high pedestal behind his chair, opening each hearing session with the Nazi salute from the bench. He acted as prosecutor, judge and jury combined, and also as his own recorder, thereby controlling the record of the written grounds for the sentences that he passed.
The frequency of death sentences rose sharply under Freisler's rule. Approximately 90% of all cases that came before him ended in guilty verdicts. He was responsible in his three years on the court for as many death sentences as all other senate sessions of the court combined in the court's existence between 1934 and 1945.
Freisler became known during this period for berating each member of the steady stream of defendants passing before him. He was known to be interested in Andrei Vyshinsky, the Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet purge trials, and had attended those show trials to watch Vyshinsky's courtroom performances in a similar capacity in Moscow in 1938.
White Rose show-trials
On 18 February 1943, Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl were captured by the Gestapo. Through questioning, it became clear that the two siblings were part of a resistance group called the White Rose that was attempting to sow discord in Germany by the use of mailing pamphlets urging passive resistance. A third resistance member, Christoph Probst was soon arrested. On 22 February 1943, Freisler was flown into Munich for the sole purpose of presiding over their trial. The verdict was as expected: guilty. Freisler sentenced the three to execution.
On 19 April 1943, Freisler was flown back again to stand as judge over the second trial of the White Rose members. Out of the thirteen defendants, three were sentenced to death, nine were given prison sentences, and one was acquitted.
20 July Plot show-trials
In August 1944, some of the arrested perpetrators of the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler were brought before Freisler for punishment. The proceedings were filmed in order to be shown to the German public in cinema newsreels, and portray how Freisler ran his court; he would often alternate between questioning the defendants in an analytical manner, then suddenly launching into a furious verbal tirade, even going so far as to shout insults at the accused from the bench.
Nearly all of the accused were sentenced to death.
Death
On the morning of 3 February 1945, Freisler was conducting a Saturday session of the People's Court when United States Army Air Forces bombers attacked Berlin, led by the B-17 of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rosenthal. Government and Nazi Party buildings were hit, including the Reich Chancellery, the Gestapo headquarters, the Party Chancellery and the People's Court. Hearing the air raid sirens, Freisler hastily adjourned the court and ordered that the prisoners be taken to an air raid shelter, but stayed behind to gather files before leaving. A bomb struck the court building at 11:08, causing a partial internal collapse, and a masonry column came loose whilst Freisler was distracted by his documents.
Among the files was that of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a 20 July Plot member who was on trial that day and facing execution. A differing account stated that Freisler "was killed by a bomb fragment while trying to escape from his law court to the air-raid shelter." Von Schlabrendorff was "standing near Freisler when the latter met his end". Von Schlabrendorff was re-tried, acquitted, and survived the war, and ultimately followed Freisler as a judge, on the Federal Constitutional Court.
His body was buried in the grave of his wife's family at the Waldfriedhof Dahlem Cemetery in Berlin. His name is not recorded on the gravestone.
Personal life
He married Marion Russegger on 24 March 1928; the couple had two sons, Harald and Roland.
Freisler in film and fiction
Freisler appears in a fictionalized form in the Hans Fallada novel Every Man Dies Alone (1947).
In the novel Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris, which takes place in an alternate 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II, Freisler is mentioned as having survived until winter 1954, when he is presumably killed by the Gestapo, to ensure that the Wannsee Conference and the Holocaust remained a secret.
Freisler has been portrayed by screen actors at least eight times: by Rainer Steffen in the German television film Die Wannseekonferenz (1984), by Roland Schäfer in the Anglo-French-German film Reunion (1989), by Brian Cox in the British television film Witness Against Hitler (1996), by Owen Teale in the BBC/HBO film Conspiracy (2001), by André Hennicke in the film Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (2005), by Helmut Stauss in the film Valkyrie (2008) by Karl Knaup in Rommel (2012, uncredited) and by Arnd Klawitter in the German television film Die Wannseekonferenz (2022).
See also
In Spanish: Roland Freisler para niños
- Hanging judge
- Kangaroo court
- Hans Frank
- Harry Haffner
- Robert Rosenthal
- Carl Schmitt
- Günther Vollmer
- Helmuth James Graf von Moltke
