Roland Freisler

Karl Roland Freisler (30 October 1893 – 3 February 1945) was a German jurist, judge and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1935 to 1942 and as President of the People's Court from 1942 to 1945. As a prominent ideologist of Nazism, he influenced as a jurist the Nazification of the German legal system. He was appointed President of the People's Court in 1942, overseeing the prosecution of political crimes as a judge and became known for his aggressive personality, his humiliation of defendants and frequent use of the death penalty in sentencing.

A law student at Kiel University, Freisler joined the Imperial German Army on the outbreak of the First World War and saw action on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded and taken prisoner of war by the Imperial Russian Army. On his return to Germany, he completed his law studies at the University of Jena and was awarded a Doctorate of Law in 1922. Freisler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, upon which he began defending Party members in court for acts of political violence.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Freisler was appointed State Secretary of the Prussian Ministry of Justice; two years later he became State Secretary in the unified Reich Ministry of Justice. Through his zealotry as well as his legal and verbal dexterity, he quickly established himself as the most feared judge in Nazi Germany and the personification of the Nazi ideology in domestic law. In 1942, representing Acting Reichsminister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger, Freisler attended the Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion.

In August 1942, Freisler succeeded Otto Georg Thierack as president of the People's Court. He presided over the show trials of the White Rose resistance group and perpetrators of the 20 July plot, and handed out over 5,000 death sentences in his three-year tenure. Freisler was killed in February 1945 during an American bombing raid on Berlin. Although the death penalty was abolished with the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, Freisler's 1941 definition of murder in German law, as opposed to the less severe crime of manslaughter, survives in the Strafgesetzbuch § 211.