On February 22nd, 1943, the Nazi regime had already ruled for a decade, suffocating any spark of freedom in Germany.

On that cold morning in Munich, a courtroom filled with inquisitive stairs becomes the stage of a dark theater.

At the center of the scene, young students from the White Rose group face charges of treason for distributing pamphlets, denouncing the horrors of the war waged by Hitler.

There is no room for defense.

The trial is a choreographed farce, a spectacle of intimidation.

The judge, enraged, does not allow interruptions.

His voice dominates the room, crushing any attempt at dialogue.

Every word spoken, every authoritarian gesture serves a single purpose, to silence any act of resistance.

Even so, the members of the White Rose remain serene.

Even in the face of hostility, they refuse to deny what they believe.

Amid screams and threats, they uphold the dignity of those who chose not to remain silent in the face of terror.

In a courtroom where justice was murdered every day, one man stood out not for his impartiality, but for his fanaticism, cruelty, and blind loyalty to the most brutal regime of the 20th century.

Roland Fryler, the Nazi judge who screamed his death sentences, a brilliant jurist who used his talent to serve terror.

From prisoner in Russia to central figure in the crulest trials of Nazi Germany, Fryler personified what happens when law is shaped to serve hatred.

Carl Roland Fryler was born on October 30th, 1893 in the city of Chella, then part of the German Empire.

His father, Julius Fryler, was an engineer and civil servant, and his mother, Charlotte, came from modest origins.

The young Roland showed academic promise, standing out in school and displaying a particular talent for language and debate, traits that would mark his future career, even if for sinister purposes.

World War I Fryler was studying law at the University of Keel when World War I broke out in 1914, interrupting his studies.

He served actively in the Imperial German Army during the war after enlisting as a fonden younger officer cadet in 1914.

While serving on the front lines with the 22nd division, he was awarded the iron cross second class for heroism in combat.

In October 1915, he was wounded in action on the Eastern Front and taken as a prisoner of war by the Imperial Russian forces.

While imprisoned, Frysler learned to speak Russian and developed an interest in Marxism.

After the onset of the Russian Revolution, the Bolevik Provisional Authority, which took over the prisoner of war camp where Frysler was held, used him as a commasar of the camp, organizing food supply logistics from 1917 to 1918.

In the late 1930s, during Joseph Stalin’s great purge in the Soviet Union, Frysler attended the Moscow trials to observe the proceedings against the condemned.

Fryler later rejected any insinuation that he had collaborated with the Soviets, the ideological enemies of Nazi Germany, but his subsequent career as a political officer in Germany was overshadowed by rumors about his time as a commasar with the Reds.

After his release and return to Germany in 1918, Frysler resumed his legal studies.

His fluency in Russian set him apart from many of his peers and he completed his doctoral thesis in law at the University of Gina in 1922.

During this period, German society was in turmoil.

War reparations, hyperinflation, and the humiliating terms of the treaty of Versailles fueled political instability.

Various extremist movements were taking shape, including the Nazi party led by the incendiary agitator Adolf Hitler.

Initially, Frysler had no direct connection to the party, but worked as a lawyer and defender in several politically charged cases, earning a reputation for his fierce courtroom demeanor.

By the late 1920s, Frysler’s political orientation took a radical turn to the right.

On July 9th, 1925, he joined the Nazi party, becoming member number 9,679.

He also secured a position as a city councelor in Castle, where his oratory skills and legal knowledge caught the attention of Nazi party officials.

Frysler quickly became known for his fervent devotion to the party’s message, advocating for radical reforms that placed the collective will of the German people above any notion of individual rights.

In his speeches, he railed against the enemies of the state, a category that in his mind included Jews, socialists, and anyone who criticized Hitler and the Nazi party.

On March 24th, 1928, Frysler married Marian Rousiger, and from this marriage, two sons were born.

When Hitler took power in January 1933, Frysler’s career prospects soared.

The new regime required legal minds capable of rationalizing the dismantling of democratic institutions by the Nazis, and Frysler proved more than willing.

In February 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Frysler was appointed ministerial director in the Prussian Ministry of Justice under Hans Carroll, he was put in charge of the personnel department and used his authority to expel Jewish members from the staff.

Frysler’s command of legal texts, his mental agility, his dramatic and forceful courtroom rhetoric, combined with his fervent conversion to Nazi ideology made him the most feared judge in Nazi Germany and the embodiment of Nazism within the internal legal system.

However, despite his talents and loyalty, Adolf Hitler never appointed him to any position outside the legal system.

This may have occurred because Frysler was an isolated figure with no backing within the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy.

Furthermore, he had been politically compromised by his brother Oswald Fryler, also a lawyer.

Oswald had repeatedly served as a defense attorney against the regime’s authority during increasingly politically motivated trials through which the Nazis sought to impose their tyrannical control over German society.

and he had a habit of wearing his Nazi party badge during these hearings.

Propaganda minister Joseph Gerbles reprimanded Oswald Fryler and reported his actions to Adolf Hitler who in response ordered his expulsion from the party.

In 1941, during a discussion at the Furer headquarters about who to appoint to replace France Girtner, the Reich Minister of Justice who had died, Gerbles suggested Roland Frysler as an option.

Hitler’s response, referring to Fryler’s alleged red past, was that old Bolevik? No.

Essentially, Fryler was among those who oversaw the legislative transformation that eroded civil liberties.

This included the enactment of laws that allowed indefinite detention without trial and special judicial practices aimed at political offenses.

Crimes that essentially encompassed all forms of disscent.

Behind the scenes, Frysler advocated for measures that destroyed the principle of equality before the law, replacing it with a racialized hierarchy.

Roland Frysler was a loyal Nazi ideologue and used his legal knowledge to adapt his fascist ideals to legislative and judicial practice.

He published a document titled the biological racial task involved in the reform of juvenile criminal law in which he argued that racially alien minors, racially degenerate, racially incurable or severely defective should be sent to youth centers or correctional institutions.

Furthermore, these individuals should be segregated from youths who were German and racially valuable.

Frysler also strongly advocated for the creation of laws to punish the so-called racial defilement, a Nazi term used to define sexual relations between Aryans and those considered of inferior races.

In 1933, he even published a pamphlet demanding the legal prohibition of sexual relations between mixed race individuals.

Frysler’s ideological opinions reflected what was to come for 2 years later on September 15th, 1935.

The Nazi regime announced two new laws.

The Reich citizenship law, which defined a citizen as a person of German or related blood, which meant that Jews defined as a separate race, could not be full citizens of Germany and had no political rights.

And the law for the protection of German blood and German honor, which prohibited future mixed marriages and sexual relations between Jews and persons of German blood or German descent.

The Nazis believed that such relations were dangerous because they gave rise to mixed race children.

According to their ideology, these children and their future offspring would end the purity of the German race.

World War II began on September 1st, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.

The following month, Frysler introduced the concept of the early juvenile criminal.

This decree provided the legal basis for imposing the death penalty and prison sentences on minors for the first time in German legal history.

At least 72 young Germans were sentenced to death by Nazi courts.

In August 1942, Frysler reached his most feared position yet, president of the people’s court, established by Hitler in 1934 to handle cases of treason and political disscent.

Ostensibly part of the judicial apparatus, the court functioned as a political weapon.

It ignored the established judicial system, ensuring that verdicts aligned with the regime’s demands for harsh punishments against opponents.

By the time Frysler took office, the people’s court had already sentenced thousands to prison or death.

However, under his leadership, the execution rate exploded.

He prided himself on delivering guilty verdicts in nearly 90% of cases.

And between 1942 and 1945, more than 5,000 death sentences were handed down by him.

One of Frysler’s first major trials as president of the people’s court involved the White Rose, an underground group of university students in Munich who opposed Hitler’s regime through nonviolent protest.

Arrested in February 1943, the central members of the White Rose faced trial before Fryler.

In a public hearing, he called them traitors to the fatherland, hurling a barrage of insults and rhetorical questions meant to humiliate and terrorize the defendants.

The Schaw siblings, Kristoff Prost and others, demonstrated remarkable composure in the face of Fryler’s furious outbursts.

Despite their calm behavior, the verdict was never in question.

All were sentenced to death.

Frysler’s courtroom style was both theatrical and terrifying.

He believed in using humiliation as a tool of domination, shouting and interrupting the defendants, belittling their motives, and framing dissent as betrayal of Germany’s war effort.

Observers noted that he often wore a blood red judicial robe, slamming his fists on the bench while calling the defendants traitors, worms, or parasites.

Trials were often rushed, sometimes lasting only a few hours, and defendants were given minimal opportunity to prepare and present their defense.

Frysler’s approach to justice was immersed in the Nazi conviction that the only appropriate outcome was total acceptance of Hitler’s will or death.

Criticism from the few traditional judges still remaining in the judicial system was quickly silenced or ignored.

In all proceedings of the people’s court, Frysler displayed clear bias in favor of the Nazi state and its ideology.

His manner of handling cases went beyond regulation and the judge’s code of conduct.

As a result, he used the law in a sadistic and perverse way.

As a national socialist fanatic, he said he wanted to judge as the furer himself would judge the case.

Frysler’s yelling during trials made it difficult for sound technicians to record the defendant’s responses.

Sometimes he shouted so much that the microphone sensitivity and volume had to be adjusted to a much lower level.

For Frysler, the people’s court was explicitly a political court.

In trials, he shamed the accused, barely listened to them, and constantly interrupted and shouted at them.

Furthermore, he conducted the proceedings in a completely irrational manner.

This deliberate and selective humiliation of defendants occurred both verbally and nonverbally.

As for example, the Nazis gave the accused old oversized clothes without a belt.

In this way, when they stood before the court, they were forced to constantly hold up their pants.

On January 20th, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi party and the German government gathered at a mansion in the Berlin suburb of Vonzi to discuss, coordinate, and implement the so-called final solution to the Jewish question.

The final solution was the code name the Nazis used to refer to the systematic and deliberate extermination of European Jews.

Adolf Hitler had authorized this genocidal plan throughout Europe in 1941, although the exact date remains unknown to this day.

By the time the Vonce conference took place, most of the participants were already aware that the Nazi regime had committed mass murders of Jews and other civilians in the Soviet Union and Serbia, areas occupied by Germany.

None of the officials present at the meeting, including Roland Frysler, who would provide legal counsel for the plan, objected to the final solution policy announced by Hydrickch.

Hydrich indicated that approximately 11 million Jews in Europe would be exterminated through the measures of the final solution.

This number included not only Jews residing in Axis controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom and neutral nations such as Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and the European part of Turkey.

On February 18th, 1943, Hans and Sophie Schaw were distributing leaflets at Ludvig Maximleian University when they were reported to the secret police, the Gestapo, and subsequently arrested.

During the interrogation, it was discovered that the two siblings were part of a resistance group called the White Rose, which wrote pamphlets critical of Hitler and the German people.

They encouraged citizens to rebel against the Nazi regime, denounced the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, and demanded an end to the war.

During questioning, Sophie was offered a reduced sentence if she admitted that her brother had led her astray, but she refused.

I will not betray my brother or my principles.

I will make no deal with the Nazis.

On February 22nd, 1943, Frysler flew to Munich for the sole purpose of presiding over their trial.

Upon entering the courtroom, Sophie Schaw surprised everyone by saying to Fryler.

After all, someone had to start.

What we wrote and expressed is also believed by many others.

They just don’t have the courage to say it as we did.

She also interrupted Fryler with a statement.

You know, the war is lost.

Why don’t you have the courage to face it? After half a day of trial, the verdict was, as expected, guilty.

Fryler had sentenced them to death by hanging, but fearing they would become martyrs if publicly executed, it was decided they would be killed by guillotine.

On April 19th, 1943, Frysler was once again transferred to serve as the judge in the second trial of the White Rose members.

At the beginning of this second trial, Frysler began energetically shouting at the accused, warning them, “National socialism does not need a penal code for traitors like you.

I will make this process short.

” After this warning, an assistant handed him the penal code.

And without saying a word, Fryler threw it at the defendant’s bench, forcing one of them to duck to avoid being hit in the head.

Of the 13 defendants, three were sentenced to death, nine to prison terms, and one was unexpectedly acquitted.

Another victim of Fryler was Alfreda Schultz, sister of the Germanborn novelist Eric Maria Remark.

On May 10th, 1933, on the initiative of Nazi propaganda minister Yseph Gerbles, Remark’s books were publicly declared unpatriotic and thus banned.

As a result, copies were removed from all libraries and their sale or publication was restricted throughout the country.

While Eric left Germany, his sister Alfreda did the opposite.

She stayed in Germany with her husband and two children.

However, she ended up being arrested after her landlord overheard her saying that the war driven by the Nazis was lost.

For that comment, she was turned over to the Nazi party.

The charge against her was based on allegedly trying to undermine Germany’s war effort.

During the trial, Frysler told Alfreda, “Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us.

” Alfreda Schultz was decapitated by guillotine on December 16th, 1943.

As the war progressed, the atmosphere in Germany grew increasingly desperate and popular support for the regime gradually eroded.

A growing group of intellectuals, military officers, and ordinary citizens began contemplating the viability of overthrowing Hitler.

when on July 20th, 1944, members of the German armed forces attempted and failed to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in Rastenberg, East Prussia, the conspirators found themselves at the mercy of the people’s court.

In the days and weeks that followed, Hitler’s security apparatus captured a large number of suspects.

Field marshal Erin Raml was pressured to commit suicide while others including Colonel Klaus von Stafenberg, General Friedrich Olrich and Colonel General Ludvig Beck were either immediately executed or forced to take their own lives.

Many others accused of participating in the conspiracy were brought to trial before Fryler at the people’s court.

In these trials, Fryler’s reputation for cruelty reached its peak.

He alternated between mocking the aristocratic origins of some conspirators and condemning them as cowards who had stabbed frontline soldiers in the back.

The courtroom was equipped with cameras to record these frenzied proceedings, a form of propaganda meant to showcase the merciless justice of the Nazi state.

The motives behind this coup attempt were quite varied and not necessarily tied to the crimes committed during the Holocaust since several of the conspirators personally intervened to ensure the final solution was carried out.

However, most of them had a more pragmatic reason to assassinate their leader, to save Germany from a catastrophic defeat brought about by Hitler’s increasingly irrational leadership.

In the following days, Hitler ordered a massive manhunt for the conspirators, which lasted for months.

In August 1944, some of the detained authors of the failed coup were brought before Frysler to be punished.

Hitler had ordered that those found guilty were to be hanged like cattle.

The proceedings were filmed to be shown to the German people in news reels.

These recordings showed how Frysler conducted his court.

Frequently, the judge would begin the trial in a rational manner, interrogating the accused in an analytical way.

Despite this beginning, his attitude would suddenly change, and Fryler would violently reprimand the defendants, even yelling at them from the bench.

This shift from a cold and clinical interrogation to an outburst of rage and fury was designed to psychologically disarm, torment, and humiliate the accused while also destroying any attempt at a defense.

At one point, Frysler shouted at field marshal vonvitzen, who was trying to hold up his pants after being given clothes that were too large.

You dirty old man.

Why do you keep playing with your trousers? Nevertheless, the accused never lost their dignity.

It is said that Irvvin Fonvitz Lebanon’s final words to Fryler were, “You may hand us over to the executioner.

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