Wilhelm Frick

Wilhelm Frick was Reich Minister of the Interior from 1933 to 1943 and a principal author of the legal apparatus on which the Holocaust rested. He drafted or signed the major antisemitic legislation of the Reich including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. He authorised the registration of Jews that produced the lists used for the deportations. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty, and hanged on 16 October 1946.

The Nuremberg Laws

Frick personally drafted, alongside Hans Globke and Wilhelm Stuckart, the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law that stripped Jews of German citizenship, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour that banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. He signed both laws in his capacity as Reich Minister of the Interior. He drafted the supplementary decrees of November 1935 that defined who counted as a Jew. The legal architecture on which the entire subsequent persecution rested was, in operational terms, his ministry’s work.

The registration

Frick’s ministry administered the registration of the German and Austrian Jewish populations from 1938 onwards. The registration produced the lists that were used, in 1941 and 1942, for the deportations. The registration system, designed by his subordinates and signed off by him, included the assignment of the additional names Israel and Sara to all Jewish citizens whose given names did not, in the regime’s view, sufficiently identify them as Jewish. The system was efficient and comprehensive. It produced lists for every German city and town. Without those lists the deportations could not have functioned at the scale they did.

The Aktion T4 authorisation

Frick co-signed the authorisation for the Aktion T4 killing programme, the murder of around 250,000 disabled people in Reich institutions between 1939 and 1945. The T4 programme was the operational and personnel precursor to the death camps: the gas chambers, the deception techniques, and many of the SS men who would later run the Operation Reinhard camps were tested and trained in the T4 killings. Frick’s authorisation, alongside that of Hitler’s Chancellery chief Philipp Bouhler and Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, was the legal basis for the operation.

Bohemia and Moravia

Frick was made Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in August 1943, succeeding Kurt Daluege after Heydrich’s assassination had removed the original holder of the position. The position gave him, in his final eighteen months, direct administrative authority over the deportation of the remaining Czech Jewish population to Theresienstadt and from there to Auschwitz. Around 30,000 Czech Jews were killed during his tenure as Protector. He had been responsible for the legal architecture of the persecution from his Berlin desk for ten years; he now had the chance to administer its application in the field.

Nuremberg

Frick refused to take the witness stand at his Nuremberg trial. He sat through the proceedings in silence. The prosecution’s case was largely documentary: the laws he had signed, the decrees he had issued, the registration files his ministry had produced, the T4 authorisation. He had nothing to offer in his defence. He was found guilty on the war crimes and crimes against humanity counts and sentenced to death. He was hanged on 16 October 1946 at Nuremberg, in the same group as Göring (who had killed himself the night before), Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart. Frick was 69.

What he was

Frick is the case of the senior civilian official who provided the legal scaffolding for the killing. He was not personally violent. He never visited a camp. He did not, on the surviving documentary record, attend the Wannsee Conference. What he did was draft and sign the laws and decrees on which the operational machinery of the killing rested. The Holocaust required, and got, senior civil servants prepared to put their names to the legislation that made the murder of European Jewry administratively possible. Frick was the most senior of them.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards