Wilhelm Frick was a prominent German politician of the Nazi Party, who served as Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 and as the last governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
34 Facts About Wilhelm Frick
2.
Wilhelm Frick managed to avoid imprisonment and soon afterwards became a leading figure of the Nazi Party in the Reichstag.
3.
Additionally, on 21 May 1935, Wilhelm Frick was named Generalbevollmachtigter fur die Reichsverwaltung.
4.
Wilhelm Frick was instrumental in formulating laws that consolidated the Nazi regime, as well as laws that defined the Nazi racial policy, most notoriously the Nuremberg Laws.
5.
On 30 August 1939, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Wilhelm Frick was appointed by Hitler to the six-person Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich which operated as a war cabinet.
6.
Wilhelm Frick remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio until Hitler's death in 1945.
7.
Wilhelm Frick attended the gymnasium in Kaiserslautern, passing his Abitur exams in 1896.
8.
Wilhelm Frick went on studying philology at the University of Munich, but soon after turned to study law in Heidelberg and Humboldt University of Berlin from 1900, he joined the Bavarian civil service in 1903, working as an attorney at the Munich Police Department.
9.
Wilhelm Frick was appointed a Bezirksamtassessor in Pirmasens in 1907 and became acting district executive in 1914.
10.
On 25 April 1910, Wilhelm Frick married Elisabetha Emilie Nagel in Pirmasens.
11.
Wilhelm Frick tried to suppress the State Police's operation, wherefore he was arrested and imprisoned, and tried for aiding and abetting high treason by the People's Court in April 1924.
12.
Wilhelm Frick went on to work at the Munich social insurance office from 1926 onwards, in the rank of a Regierungsrat 1st class by 1933.
13.
Wilhelm Frick had been nominated by the National Socialist Freedom Movement, an electoral list of the far-right German Volkisch Freedom Party and then banned Nazi Party.
14.
On 1 September 1925, Wilhelm Frick joined the re-established Nazi Party.
15.
Wilhelm Frick associated himself with the radical Gregor Strasser; making his name by aggressive anti-democratic and antisemitic Reichstag speeches, he climbed to the post of the Nazi parliamentary group leader in 1928.
16.
On 23 January 1930, Wilhelm Frick was appointed to these ministries, becoming the first Nazi to hold a ministerial-level post at any level in Germany.
17.
Wilhelm Frick used his position to dismiss Communist and Social Democratic officials and replace them with Nazi Party members, so Thuringia's federal subsidies were temporarily suspended by Reich Minister Carl Severing.
18.
Wilhelm Frick was removed from office by a Social Democratic motion of no confidence in the Thuringian Landtag parliament on 1 April 1931.
19.
When Reich president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933, Wilhelm Frick joined his government as Reichsminister of the Interior.
20.
Together with Reichstag President Hermann Goring, he was one of only two Nazi Reichsministers in the original Hitler Cabinet, and the only one who actually had a portfolio; Goring served as minister without portfolio until 5 May Though Wilhelm Frick held a key position, especially in organizing the federal elections of March 1933, he initially had far less power than his counterparts in the rest of Europe.
21.
Wilhelm Frick was responsible for drafting many of the Gleichschaltung laws that consolidated the Nazi regime.
22.
Wilhelm Frick initiated and drafted the Law Against the Formation of Parties that formally made the NSDAP the only legal party in Germany.
23.
Wilhelm Frick drafted the Law on the Abolition of the Reichsrat that abolished the upper chamber of the Reich parliament.
24.
Wilhelm Frick was made a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law.
25.
Wilhelm Frick was instrumental in the racial policy of Nazi Germany drafting laws against Jewish citizens, like the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" and the notorious Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
26.
Wilhelm Frick took a leading part in Germany's re-armament in violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty.
27.
Wilhelm Frick drafted laws introducing universal military conscription and extending the Wehrmacht service law to Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, as well as to the "Sudetenland" territories of the First Czechoslovak Republic annexed according to the Munich Agreement.
28.
On 11 November 1938, Wilhelm Frick promulgated the Regulations Against Jews' Possession of Weapons.
29.
Wilhelm Frick's power was greatly reduced in June 1936 when Hitler named Himmler the Chief of German Police, which effectively united the police with the SS.
30.
Wilhelm Frick was then appointed as Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, making him Hitler's personal representative in the Czech lands.
31.
Wilhelm Frick was arrested, and was arraigned at the Nuremberg trials, where he was the only defendant besides Rudolf Hess who refused to testify on his own behalf.
32.
Wilhelm Frick was accused of being one of the most senior people responsible for the existence of the concentration camps.
33.
Wilhelm Frick was sentenced to death on 1 October 1946, and was hanged at Nuremberg Prison on 16 October.
34.
Wilhelm Frick seemed the least steady of any so far and stumbled on the thirteenth step of the gallows.