The 1st of October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany.

After more than 10 months on a trial, 21 defendants who are among the
most important political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany, hear
their sentences read.

These high-ranking representatives of the criminal Nazi regime have
to finally take responsibility for their crimes and answer before an International Military
tribunal who will punish them for unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World
War.

It is only one of many war crimes trials held after the Second World War and will become a
warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere.

Once the true extent of the German atrocities,
especially against Jews, are revealed, 12 defendants out of the 21 are sentenced to death
by hanging.

One of them is a former Reich Minister of the Interior and Reich Protector for Bohemia
and Moravia who in the decisive first years of the Nazi dictatorship directed legislation
that removed Jews from public life, abolished political parties, and sent political dissidents
to concentration camps.

His name is Wilhelm Frick.

Wilhelm Frick, the youngest of four children
of Protestant teacher Wilhelm Frick and his wife Henriette, was born on the 12 March 1877 in
Alsenz, then part of the German Empire.

In 1896 Frick graduated from the gymnasium and he went on
to study philology at the University of Munich.

However, after one semester he turned to study
law at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin.

He passed his examinations in Munich in 1900 and
on the following year he received his doctorate.

Frick then worked as an attorney at
the Munich Police Department and in 1910 he married Elisabetha Emilie Nagel.

The
marriage produced two sons and a daughter.

The First World War began on the
28th of July 1914.

Rejected as unfit, Frick did not enlist in the German Army and
when the war ended on 11th of November 1918, he worked at the Police Department in Munich.

There Frick witnessed the end of the war and the German Revolution of 1918–1919.

In 1919, he
was put in charge of the political police as a district officer and in this role, he sympathized
with right-wing extremism.

On one occasion he helped a Freikorps member who had committed
murders to escape by issuing false passports.

The Freikorps or independent paramilitary units
were composed primarily of World War I veterans returning from the war, and they fought
against communists and other groups they believed were responsible for German defeat.

In 1919, the Chief of Police Ernst Pöhner introduced Frick to Adolf Hitler, whom he
helped willingly with obtaining permission to hold political rallies and demonstrations.

In 1923, Wilhelm Frick became a senior officer and head of the security service of the
Munich criminal investigation department.

In his new position, Frick participated
in the Beer Hall putsch which took place on November 8–9, 1923 when Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government.

The plotters
hoped to march on Berlin to launch a national revolution but the insurrection failed miserably.

Units of the Munich police force clashed with Nazi stormtroopers as they marched into the
city center.

The two groups exchanged fire, which resulted in the deaths of 16
Nazi Party members and four police officers.

This attempted coup d’état
became known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

Had the putsch succeeded, Frick was to become the
new police chief.

During the attempted putsch, he remained in the police headquarters
and ensured, among other things, that the state police and the representative of
the police president was not alerted immediately.

Frick was arrested, imprisoned, and tried for
aiding and abetting high treason in April 1924.

After several months in custody, he was given a
suspended sentence of 15 months’ imprisonment and was dismissed from his police job.

Later during
the disciplinary proceedings, the dismissal was declared unfair and revoked, on the basis that
his treasonous intention had not been proven.

In the wake of the putsch, the federal and
Bavarian government banned the Nazi Party, its formations, and its newspaper.

Thus, when Wilhelm Frick was elected a member of the Reichstag – the German
parliament – in the federal election of May 1924, he had been nominated by the National
Socialist Freedom Movement.

This political party was formed by the Nazis as a legal means
of carrying on the party and its ideology.

However, Hitler’s public commitment
to coming to power legally induced the authorities to lift the ban in 1925 and
the National Socialist Freedom Movement was reabsorbed into the Nazi Party which
Wilhelm Frick joined the same year.

On 20 May 1928, he was one of
the first 12 deputies elected to the Reichstag as Nazi Party members.

His Reichstag speeches were characterized by radical anti-Semitism and racism as
well as massive abuse and insults of his political opponents.

Through his
destructive work in the Reichstag, he played a decisive role in the
downfall of parliamentarianism in the Weimar Republic which was the name given
to the German government from 1918 to 1933.

In 1929, as the price for joining the coalition
government of the German state of Thuringia, the Nazi Party received the state ministries of
the Interior and Education.

On 23 January 1930, Frick was appointed to these ministries, becoming
the first Nazi to hold a ministerial-level post at any level in Germany.

Frick used
his position in Thuringia to dismiss Communist and Social Democratic officials
and replace them with Nazi Party members.

When Reich president Paul von Hindenburg appointed
Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933, Frick joined his government as Reichsminister of the Interior.

Together with Reichstag President Hermann Göring, he was one of only two Nazi Reichsministers in
the original Hitler Cabinet, and the only one who actually had a portfolio as until 5 May
Göring served as minister without portfolio.

Though his ministry was almost powerless at the
time, Frick’s power dramatically increased as a result of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the
Enabling Act of 1933.

These abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way
for Nazi dictatorship.

The decree suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of
the press, and other constitutional protections, including all restraints on police investigations.

Frick saw the fire as a chance to increase his power and begin the process of Nazifying the
country.

He was responsible for drafting many laws that consolidated the Nazi regime,
such as the 14 July 1933 Law Against the Formation of Parties that formally made the
Nazi party the only legal party in Germany.

On 10 October 1933, Hitler appointed him a
Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party.

On 1 May 1934,
he replaced Minister-President Göring as Prussian Minister of the Interior, which
gave him control over the police in Prussia.

The same year his marriage to
Elisabetha Emilie Nagel ended in an ugly divorce.

A few weeks later,
on 12 March, Frick remarried Margarete Schultze-Naumburg.

Margarete gave birth
to daughter Renate and son Dieter.

By 1935, Frick had near-total control over
local government.

He had the sole power to appoint the mayors of all municipalities
with populations greater than 100,000, except for the city states of Berlin and Hamburg, where Hitler reserved the right to appoint
the mayors himself if he deemed it necessary.

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”.

The primary objective of the law was to establish a “national”
and “professional” civil service by dismissing certain groups of tenured civil servants.

Individuals of non-Aryan origin, particularly those of Jewish descent, were compelled
to retire, while members of the Communist Party or affiliated organizations were to be
terminated from their positions.

Additionally, the law forbade Jews, non-Aryans, and political
opponents from holding positions as teachers, professors, judges, or within the
government.

Its reach extended to other professions such as lawyers, doctors,
tax consultants, musicians, and notaries.

It was Wilhelm Frick who drafted The Reich
Citizenship Law and The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor which Nazi
regime announced on September 15, 1935.

These laws informally became known as the Nuremberg
Laws or Nuremberg Race Laws because they were first announced at a Nazi Party rally held in the
German city of Nuremberg.

The Reich Citizenship Law defined a citizen as a person who is “of
German or related blood.

” This meant that Jews, defined as a separate race, could not be
full citizens of Germany and they had no political rights.

The Law for the Protection of
German Blood and German Honor was a law against what the Nazis viewed as race-mixing or “race
defilement”.

It banned future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people “of
German or related blood.

” The Nazis believed that such relationships were dangerous because they led
to “mixed race” children.

According to the Nazis, these children and their descendants
undermined the purity of the German race.

The Nuremberg Laws, which Frick actively enforced,
changed the everyday lives of Jews in Germany by making Jews legally different from their
non-Jewish neighbors.

In the years that followed, the Nazi regime enacted more and more anti-Jewish
laws and decrees.

These later laws relied on the definition of “Jew” as defined in the Nuremberg
Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws were an important step in the Nazi regime’s process of isolating and
excluding Jews from the rest of German society and paved the way for the ” final solution.

”
Frick also advocated for stronger persecution of homosexuals.

He said: “men committing
unnatural sexual acts with men must be persecuted with utmost severity.

Such vices will
lead to the disintegration of the German people.

” Already in July 1933, Wilhelm Frick had
implemented the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring
including forced sterilizations, which later culminated in the killings
of the Action T4 “euthanasia” programme.

During the war nursing homes, hospitals, and
asylums in which euthanasia was practiced, came under Frick’s jurisdiction.

He had knowledge
that mentally disabled, sick and aged people, whom Nazis deemed the “useless eaters,” were being
systematically put to death.

Though complaints of these murders reached him, he did nothing
to stop them.

It is estimated that 275,000 mentally deficient and aged people, for whose
welfare he was responsible, fell victim to it.

Frick also took a leading part in
Germany’s re-armament in violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty.

He drafted laws
introducing universal military conscription and extending the Wehrmacht – the German Armed
Forces – service law to the annexed Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, as well as to the
“Sudetenland” – the border territories of the First Czechoslovak Republic with the Ethnic
German population annexed to Germany according to the Munich Agreement in the same year.

In setting up German administration in Austria, he issued decrees which introduced
German law, the Nuremberg Decrees, the Military Service Law, and he provided for
police security by Himmler, the head of the SS.

He also signed the law establishing
the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

From the mid-to-late 1930s Frick lost favour
irreversibly within the Nazi Party after a power struggle with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler wanted to control Germany’s police force whereas Frick’s position gave him this authority.

For example, in 1933 Frick tried to restrict the widespread use of “protective custody” orders that
were used to send people to concentration camps, only to be begged off by Himmler.

His power
was greatly reduced in June 1936 when Hitler named Himmler the Chief of German Police, which
effectively united the police with the SS.

On paper, Frick was Himmler’s immediate superior
but in fact, the police were now independent of Frick’s control, since the SS was responsible only
to Hitler.

A long-running power struggle between the two culminated in Frick’s being replaced
by Himmler as Reichsminister of the Interior in August 1943.

Though Frick’s power in Germany
was greatly reduced, he remained in the cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio.

Besides
Hitler, only Frick and the minister of finance of Germany Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk
were the only members of the Third Reich’s cabinet to serve continuously from Hitler’s
appointment as Chancellor until his death.

On 24 August 1943 Frick was appointed as Protector
of Bohemia and Moravia, making him Hitler’s personal representative in the Czech lands.

As Reich Protector, Frick had a representative function; the real power was held by the
“German Minister of State for the Protectorate”, the head of the administration Karl Hermann Frank.

However, as the Supreme Reich Authority in Bohemia and Moravia, Frick bore general responsibility for
the acts of oppression in that territory, such as terrorism of the population, slave labour, and the
deportation of Jews to the concentration camps for extermination.

Frick’s duties as Reich Protector
were considerably more limited than those of his predecessor, and he had no legislative and limited
personal executive authority in the Protectorate.

Nevertheless, Frick was fully aware of what
the Nazi policies of occupation were in Europe, particularly with respect to Jews, at that time,
and by accepting the office of Reich Protector he assumed responsibility for carrying out
those policies in Bohemia and Moravia.

In his position, Frick used ruthless methods to
counter dissent and while he was Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, thousands of Jews were
transferred from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

After the breakup of Czechoslovakia, approximately 118,310 persons defined as Jews
lived in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Of 82,309 Jews deported from the
Protectorate, the Germans and their collaborators killed approximately 71,000 in
the Holocaust.

The occupation authorities and their Czech collaborators killed another 7,000
Protectorate Jews in Bohemia and Moravia.

By 1945, some 14,000 Protectorate Jews remained
alive in the Czech lands.

Prague was one of the last Axis-held cities to fall
at the end of World War II in Europe.

Justice finally caught up with Wilhelm
Frick when he was arrested and tried at the Nuremberg trials which were held against
representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany.

Frick was indicted for:
– Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace
– Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace – Participating in war crimes
– And crimes against humanity Frick was the only defendant besides Rudolf
Hess who refused to testify on his own behalf.

During the trials, Frick was accused
of being one of the architects of the Holocaust.

As early as 1932, Frick threatened
his opponents in the Reichstag with these words: “Don’t worry, when we are in power, we shall
put all of you guys in concentration camps.

” He did all in his power to fulfill his words.

During the Nazi regime, Frick was the highest controlling authority over concentration camps
and his Ministry of the Interior also made the necessary legal arrangements for acquiring
land for the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

He personally inspected these camps and examined
them as Jews were beaten, tortured, starved, worked to death, and eventually murdered
through the so called “ extermination though work” or through extermination in gas chambers.

Wilhelm Frick legalized, procured and oversaw the concentration camps and demonstrated particular
interest in the “medical” experiments carried on in the concentration camps under the personal
direction of Himmler.

In 1943, Frick paid a personal visit to Germany’s oldest concentration
camp, Dachau, for the purpose of inspecting the malaria station and Dr.

Sigmund Rascher’s
Experimental Station.

There Frick could personally acquaint himself with the forced subjection of
healthy camp inmates to malarial mosquitos and the air-pressure and freezing experiments
on human beings carried on by Dr.

Rascher.

On the 1st of October 1946 the International
Military tribunal found Wilhelm Frick innocent of – Participation in a common plan or
conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace but guilty of 3 other charges:
– Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
– participating in war crimes – and crimes against humanity and
sentenced him to death by hanging.

In his closing statement, Frick showed no
remorse and said: “I have a clear conscience towards the prosecution.

My whole life has
been a service to my people and my country.

I have dedicated my best strength to them
in the most faithful fulfillment of duty.

I am convinced that no patriotic American or
citizen of any other country would have acted differently in my place in the same situation.

For any other course of action would have been a breach of my oath of allegiance, high
treason and treason against my country.

” Frick was executed on 16 October 1946 by
American Army sergeant John C.

Woods who had no documented pre-war experience
as a hangman.

It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job to make the 10
Nazi war criminals that he executed that day, suffer as they all died in long agonizing death.

The Nazis executed by sergeant Woods fell
from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death
by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes.

Additionally, the trapdoor
was too small causing several of the condemned, including Wilhelm Frick, to suffer
bleeding head injuries as they fell.

Of his execution, journalist
Joseph Kingsbury-Smith wrote: “The sixth man to l,feave his prison
cell and walk with handcuffed wrists to the death house was 69-year-old Wilhelm
Frick.

He entered the execution chamber at 2.

05 am.

He seemed the least steady
of any so far and stumbled on the thirteenth step of the gallows.

His only
words were, “Long live eternal Germany”.

After he had said his last words, Frick was
hanged but because he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his
horrible convulsing lasted 12 long minutes before he died.

In addition, he suffered serious injuries
caused from hitting his head on the trap door.

After his execution, Frick’s
corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Wenzbach, a
small tributary of the River Isar.

Sergeant Woods later not only insisted he
had performed all executions correctly, but also stated he was very proud of his work.

Joseph Malta, the U.

S.

Army military policeman
who held the noose as John C.

Woods, carried out the executions said 50 years later: “It was
a pleasure doing it.

I’d do it all over again.

” There were no tears shed for Wilhelm Frick.

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