1. Karl Roland Freisler 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.
40 Facts About Roland Freisler
1. 2.
Roland Freisler attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion.
3.
Roland Freisler was baptized as a Protestant on 13 December 1893.
4.
Roland Freisler had a younger brother, Oswald, who became a lawyer, and another brother who became a doctor.
5.
Roland Freisler attended the Wilhelmsgymnasium Kassel and received his Abitur in 1912, graduating at the top of his class.
6.
Roland Freisler was attending law school at Kiel University upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which interrupted his studies.
7.
Roland Freisler 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.
8.
However, in the early days of his Nazi Party career in the 1920s, Roland Freisler was a part of the movement's left wing.
9.
Roland 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.
10.
Roland Freisler 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 SA men who were regularly facing prosecutions for acts of political violence.
11.
From late 1925 to September 1927, Roland Freisler was the Deputy Gauleiter in Gau Hessen-Nassau Nord under Walter Schultz.
12.
Roland Freisler was a member of the Party's National Socialist Motor Corps, attaining the rank of NSKK-Brigadefuhrer in 1942.
13.
Roland Freisler was elected to the Prussian Landtag in April 1932 serving until the Landtag was dissolved in October 1933.
14.
Party Comrade Roland Freisler is usable as only a speaker though and is unsuitable for any position of authority because of his unreliability and moodiness.
15.
In February 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Roland Freisler was appointed Ministerial Director in the Prussian Ministry of Justice under Hans Kerrl.
16.
Roland Freisler was placed in charge of the personnel office and used his authority to force out Jewish members of the staff.
17.
Roland Freisler was the chairman of its Criminal Law Committee, head of its department of scientific studies and editor of the Academy newspaper.
18.
Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels reproached Oswald Roland Freisler and reported his actions to Adolf Hitler who, in response, ordered Roland Freisler's expulsion from the Party.
19.
Roland Freisler was a committed Nazi ideologist and used his legal skills to adapt its theories into practical law-making and judicature.
20.
Roland Freisler published a paper entitled Die rassebiologische Aufgabe bei der Neugestaltung des Jugendstrafrechts.
21.
Roland Freisler strongly advocated the creation of laws to punish Rassenschande, to be classed as "racial treason".
22.
Roland Freisler looked to racist laws in the United States states as a model for Nazi legislation to target Jews in Germany.
23.
Roland Freisler considered Jim Crow racist legislation "primitive" for failing to provide a legal definition of the term black or negro person.
24.
In October 1939, Roland Freisler introduced the concept of 'precocious juvenile criminal' in the "Juvenile Felons Decree".
25.
Roland Freisler met with him and explained that the ministry was establishing orderly procedures for the program with "expert committees" and "grievance councils", but he did not dispute the legality of the killings, arguing that the Nazi state had brought about a new concept of law.
26.
On 31 October 1941, Roland Freisler issued a directive that Jewish inmates must wear the identifying yellow badge in Reich prisons.
27.
Roland Freisler worked closely with the Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, on standardizing penalties for Jews and Poles in the occupied eastern territories.
28.
On 20 January 1942, Roland 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.
29.
On 20 August 1942, Hitler promoted Otto Georg Thierack to Reich Justice Minister, replacing the retiring Schlegelberger, and named Roland Freisler to succeed Thierack as president of the People's Court.
30.
Roland Freisler acted as prosecutor, judge and jury combined, and as his own recorder, thereby controlling the record of the written grounds for the sentences that he passed.
31.
Roland Freisler 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.
32.
Roland Freisler became known during this period for berating each member of the steady stream of defendants passing before him.
33.
Roland Freisler was known to be interested in Andrey 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.
34.
On 22 February 1943, Roland Freisler was flown into Munich for the sole purpose of presiding over their trial.
35.
Roland Freisler sentenced the three to death by hanging but, fearful of them being raised to martyrdom status if they were publicly killed, it was decided to execute them by guillotine instead.
36.
On 19 April 1943, Roland Freisler was flown back again to stand as judge over the second trial of the White Rose members.
37.
The proceedings were filmed in order to be shown to the German public in cinema newsreels, and portray how Roland 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.
38.
The flattened remains of Roland Freisler were found beneath the rubble still clutching the files he had stopped to retrieve.
39.
Roland Freisler married Marion Russegger on 24 March 1928; the couple had two sons, Harald and Roland.
40.
Roland Freisler appears in a fictionalized form in the Hans Fallada novel Every Man Dies Alone.