Name Oswald Freisler Role Lawyer | Siblings Roland Freisler | |
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Parents Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger, Julius Freisler People also search for Roland Freisler, Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger, Julius Freisler | ||
Oswald Freisler (29 December 1895 in Hamelin – 4 March 1939 in Berlin) was a lawyer in Nazi Germany and the brother of the Judge President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler.
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Life
Freisler attended Gymnasium in Aachen and Kassel, where in 1914 he passed his Abitur. He studied law in Kiel, Frankfurt and Göttingen. In February 1924, he opened a law firm with his brother Roland Freisler in Kassel. Freisler joined the Nazi Party in 1927 and was a member of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals. From 1933 he was Gauführer in Kassel and a member of the Academy for German Law. In 1933, he became president of the bar association in Kassel. In 1936, he took over the Berlin office of Jewish lawyer Johannes Werthauer, who left Germany in 1933 in order to teach classes at the Sorbonne.
Freisler, though a Nazi, appeared as the defense counsel in politically significant trials which the Nazis sought to use for propaganda purposes. He even wore his Nazi Party badge in court, which confused the Party's role in these trials. On behalf of the Catholic Church, Freisler took over the defense of three co-defendants in the trial of Joseph C. Rossaint, a resistance fighter against National Socialism, in 1937, and won an acquittal, much to the displeasure of the Nazi Party. In response, Joseph Goebbels asked Adolf Hitler to personally exclude Freisler from the party. On 30 April 1937, Goebbels noted with satisfaction, "Freisler expelled from the party by the Führer."
In 1939, Freisler mysteriously committed suicide in Berlin after he had been accused of irregularities at a defense. There are three versions of Freisler's death. One says that he threw himself out of the window of his office. For another version, the incident is said to have played out in prison. The third version is that he had injected himself with an overdose of insulin.