Roland Freisler

Early life

Roland Freisler was born in Celle, Lower Saxony, on 30 October 1893. He was the son of Julius Freisler (born 20 August 1862 in Klantendorf, Moravia), an engineer and teacher, and Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger (born 30 April 1863 in Celle – died 20 March 1932 in Kassel). He was baptised as a Protestant on 13 December 1893. He had a younger brother, Oswald. In 1914 he was at law school when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies.

World War I

Freisler saw active service during World War I. He enlisted as an officer cadet in 1914 with the Ober-Elsässisches Infanterie-Regiment Nr.167 in Kassel, and by 1915 he was a lieutenant. Whilst in the front-line with the German Imperial Army's 22nd Division he was awarded the Iron Cross both 2nd and 1st Class for heroism in action. In October 1915 he was wounded in action on the Eastern Front and taken prisoner of war by Russian forces.

Whilst 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 organising the camp's food supplies in 1917-1918. It is possible that after the Russian prisoner of war camps were emptying in 1918, with their internees being repatriated to Germany after the Armistice between Russia and the Central Powers had been signed, Freisler for a brief period became attached in some way to the Red Guards, though this is not supported by any known documentary evidence. 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, though in the early days of his National Socialist German Workers' Party career in the 1920s Freisler was a part of the movement's left wing, and in the late 1930s he attended the Soviet Moscow Trials to watch the proceedings. Freisler later rejected any insinuation that he had ever co-operated with the Nazi regime's ideological enemy, 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 career

He returned to Germany in 1919 to complete his law studies at the University of Jena, and qualified as a Doctor of Law in 1922. From 1924 he worked as a solicitor in Kassel. He was also elected a city councillor as a member of the Völkisch-Sozialer Block ("People's Social Block"), an extreme nationalist splinter party. Freisler joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party in July 1925 as Member #9679. and gained authority immediately within the organisation by using his legal training to defend members of it who were regularly facing prosecutions for acts of political violence. As the Party transitioned from a fringe political beer-hall and street fighting movement into a political one, Freisler was elected for it to the Prussian Landtag, and later he became a Member of the Reichstag.

In 1927 Karl Weinrich, a Nazi member of the Prussian Landtag along with Freisler, characterised his then 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 only usable as a speaker though and is unsuitable for any position of authority because of his unreliablity and moodiness."

Career in Nazi Germany

In February 1933, after the revolutionary take-over of the German state by Adolf Hitler with the Enabling Act of 1933, Freisler was appointed as the Director of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. He was Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Justice in 1933–1934, and in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942.

Freisler's mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic court-room verbal dexterity and verbal force, in combination with his zealous conversion to National Socialist ideology, made him the most feared judge in Germany during the Third Reich, and the personification of Nazism in domestic Law. However, despite his talents and loyalty, Adolf Hitler never appointed him to a government post beyond the legal system. This might have been attributable to the fact that he was a lone figure lacking support within the senior echelons of the Nazi hierarchy, and also partly that he had been politically compromised through family association with his brother Oswald Freisler, who was also a lawyer, who had appeared as the defence counsel in court against the Regime's authority several times in its programme of increasingly politically-driven trials with which it sought to enforce its tyrannical control of German society, and who had a habit of wearing his Nazi Party membership badge in court whilst doing so. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels reproved Oswald Freisler and reported his actions to Adolf Hitler, who in response ordered Freisler's expulsion from the Party. (Oswald Freisler committed suicide in 1939). 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, in an echo of Freisler's "Red" past, was: "That old Bolshevik? No!"

Contribution to the Nazification of the law

Freisler was a committed National Socialist 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."

He strongly advocated the creation of laws to punish Rassenschande ("race defilement", the Nazi term for sexual relations between "Aryans" and "inferior races"), to be classed as 'racial treason'. In 1933 he 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, at the time, 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" (September 1939) introducing the term perpetrator type, which was used in combination with another National Socialist 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."

Wannsee Conference

On 20 January 1942 Freisler, representing the Reich Minister Franz Schlegelberger, attended the Wannsee Conference of senior governmental officials in a villa on the outskirts of the South-West of Berlin to provide expert legal advice for the planning of the destruction of European Jewry.

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, with many death sentences. 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 increased its notoriety, and despite its judicial trappings it rapidly turned into an executive execution arm and psychological domestic terror weapon of Nazi Germany's totalitarian regime, in the tradition of the Revolutionary Tribunal more than a court of law.

Freisler 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 embodied into one role, and his own recorder, thereby controlling the record of the written grounds for the sentences that he passed.

The number of death sentences rose sharply under Freisler's rule. Approximately 90% of all proceedings that came before him received sentences of death or life imprisonment, the sentences frequently having been determined before the trial. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 5,000 death sentences were decreed by him, and of these 2,600 through the court's First Senate, which Freisler controlled. He was responsible in his three years on the court for as many death sentences as all other senate sessions of the court put together in the court's existence between 1934 and 1945.

Freisler became in this period notorious for berating in a personalized injudicial manner from the bench the steady stream of defendants passing before him on their way to their deaths, often shouting and occasionally yelling at them – particularly in cases of resistance to the authority of the Nazi state – in an enraged, glaringly clarion, but dramatically controlled harsh voice, using a mastery of the art of court-room performance artifice. He was known to be interested in Andrei Vyshinsky, the Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet purge trials, and Freisler attended those show-trials to watch Vyshinsky's performances when he had been engaged in the same work in Moscow in 1938.

White Rose show-trials

In 1943 Freisler punished several members of the White Rose resistance group that the Gestapo brought before him by ordering their execution by beheading using the Fallbeil (guillotine).

20th July Plot show-trials

In August 1944 a number of the arrested perpetrators of the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler were taken before Freisler for punishment, with the proceedings being recorded by film camera with the intention of displaying it to the German public in cinema newsreels. In the multiple hearings the atmosphere with which Freisler ran his court was revealed, showing him alternating between engaging the prisoners in a cerebral manner, with clinical interrogations to prove their guilt of the charges; verbally and psychologically toying with them, or yelling personalized theatrical enraged abuse at them from the bench. At one point he yelled at Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who was trying to hold his trousers up after being given old, oversized clothing to wear without a belt, "You dirty old man, why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?" Nearly all were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within 2 hours of the verdicts being passed.

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. 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 before him be taken to an air-raid shelter, but paused himself to gather files before following. A sudden direct hit on the court-building at 11.08 A.M. caused a partial internal collapse, with Freisler being crushed by a masonry column and killed whilst still in the court-room. His body was found beneath the rubble still clutching the files that he had stopped to retrieve.

A foreign correspondent reported, "Apparently nobody regretted his death." Luise Jodl, then the wife of General Alfred Jodl, recounted more than 25 years later that she had been working at the Lützow Hospital when Freisler's body was brought in, and that a worker commented, "It is God's verdict." According to Mrs Jodl, "Not one person said a word in reply."

Freisler's 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

Freisler married Marion Russegger on 24 March 1928; the marriage produced two sons, Harald and Roland.