32 Facts About Wilhelm Stuckart

Wilhelm Georg Joseph Stuckart was a German Nazi Party lawyer, official, and a State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry during the Nazi era.

Wilhelm Stuckart was a co-author of the Nuremberg Laws and a participant in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned.

Wilhelm Stuckart served as Reichsminister of the Interior in the short-lived Flensburg government at the end of the Second World War.

Wilhelm Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden, the son of a railway employee.

Wilhelm Stuckart was active in the far right early on and joined the Freikorps von Epp in 1919 to resist the French occupation of the Ruhr.

Wilhelm Stuckart finished his studies in 1928, receiving a doctorate with a thesis entitled Erklarung an die Offentlichkeit, insbesondere die Anmeldung zum Handelsregister ; he passed the bar examination in 1930.

Wilhelm Stuckart renewed his association with the NSDAP and provided party comrades with legal counseling during this period.

Wilhelm Stuckart did not rejoin the party immediately, as judges were prohibited from being politically active.

Wilhelm Stuckart's quick rise in the German state administration was unusual for a person of modest background and would have been impossible without his long dedication to the Nazi cause.

On 15 May 1933, Wilhelm Stuckart was appointed Ministerial Director of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture, and on 30 June 1933, he was made a State Secretary.

On 7 July 1934, Wilhelm Stuckart became the State Secretary and head of the Central Office in the recently established Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture under Bernhard Rust.

Wilhelm Stuckart moved to Darmstadt, where he worked from February to March 1935 as the president of the superior district court.

On 7 March 1935, Wilhelm Stuckart began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, Division I: Constitution and Legislation, with the responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship and racial laws.

In 1936, Wilhelm Stuckart became a member of the Academy for German Law and chairman of its committee on administrative law.

Wilhelm Stuckart was formally promoted to State Secretary in the Interior Ministry on 1 April 1938.

On 18 August 1939, Wilhelm Stuckart signed a confidential decree regarding the "Reporting Obligations of Deformed Newborns," which became the basis for the Nazi regime's euthanasia of children.

Two years later, Wilhelm Stuckart's own one-year-old son, Gunther, who was born with Down syndrome, became a victim of this programme.

Wilhelm Stuckart was a member of the SA from 1932 and applied for membership in the SS in December 1933.

Wilhelm Stuckart was awarded the Golden Party Badge on 30 January 1939 and was promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer on 30 January 1944.

Wilhelm Stuckart stated that these laws represented "a preliminary solution of the Jewish question".

In October 1939, Wilhelm Stuckart was tasked with investigating the comprehensive rationalization of the state administrative structure by decentralisation and simplification.

Wilhelm Stuckart proposed that the state and party should effectively be combined in an overarching concept of the Reich, and should co-operate at the highest levels of power, so that ground-level friction between the institutions could be solved by referencing upwards.

At this meeting, Wilhelm Stuckart argued that only first-degree Mischlinge should be sterilized by force, after which they should be allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a "natural extinction".

Wilhelm Stuckart was concerned about causing distress to German spouses and children of "interracial" couples.

Wilhelm Stuckart served briefly as Interior Minister in Karl Donitz's Flensburg Government in May 1945.

Wilhelm Stuckart himself was tried by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Ministries Trial in 1948 for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws.

Former co-worker Bernhard Losener from Interior Ministry testified that Wilhelm Stuckart had been aware of the murder of the Jews even before the Wannsee Conference.

Wilhelm Stuckart's defense argued that his support for the forced sterilization of Mischlinge was to prevent or delay even more drastic measures.

Wilhelm Stuckart was killed on 15 November 1953 near Hanover, West Germany, in a car accident a day before his 51st birthday.

Wilhelm Stuckart held firm opinions concerning racial legislation and administrative organisation.

From May 1940 onward, Wilhelm Stuckart made several requests to be released from his job to military service in the Wehrmacht, but these were turned down personally by Hitler.

Wilhelm Stuckart is portrayed by Peter Fitz in the 1984 German film, Colin Firth in the 2001 film and Godehard Giese in the 2022 film.