Background
Otto Thierack was born in Wiirzen, Saxony, on 19 April 1889, the son of middle-class parents.
Otto Thierack was born in Wiirzen, Saxony, on 19 April 1889, the son of middle-class parents.
He studied law and political science at Marburg and Leipzig, graduating as a Doctor of Law in February 1914.
After serving in W'orld War I as a Lieutenant and receiving the Iron Cross (Second Class), Thierack pursued a legal career and was appointed Public Prosecutor in Leipzig and then in Dresden. An early member of the NSDAP and a former leader of the Nazi Lawyers' League, Thierack became Minister of Justice for Saxony in 1933 and two years later he was appointed Vice-President of the Reich Supreme Court of Justice. From 1936 to 1942 he was President of the People's Court in Berlin, established to provide summary justice in camera and without appeal for those accused of crimes against the Third Reich. A Major General in the SS and SA-Gruppenfuhrer, Thierack was Reich Minister of Justice from 1942 to 1945.
After the war Thierack was arrested and interned, but hanged himself at Neumunster camp on 26 October 1946 before he could be brought to trial at Nuremberg.
His brief from Hitler of 20 August 1942 empowered him to disregard any existing law in order to establish a ‘National Socialist administration of justice’. Thierack worked to make legally practicable the suggestion of Goebbels that various categories of foreigners imprisoned or conscripted by the Third Reich should be press-ganged into concentration camps and ‘exterminated by labour'. On 18 September 1942 Thierack came to a monstrous agreement with Himmler for the ‘delivery of asocials for the execution of their sentences’, drafting the decrees for working to death whole populations who were to be admitted to concentration camps without any charge being offered. Apart from Jews and gypsies the decrees also affected all conscripted eastern workers, especially Russians and Ukrainians. Poles serving more than three years in prison, as well as Czechs and Germans serving more than eight years, were also among the ‘anti-social' elements of the prison population to be handed over to the tender care of Himmler’s SS.
To make the territories in the East ‘fit’ for German colonization, Thierack recommended that ‘ in future, Jews, Poles, gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians convicted of offences should not be sentenced by ordinary courts but should be executed by the Reichsfiihrer-SS in view of the leadership’s plans for settling the eastern problem’. In a letter to Martin Bormann on 13 October 1942 Thierack revealed, with unusual frankness, the reasons behind this policy: ‘The administration of justice can make only a small contribution to the extermination of these peoples. No useful purpose is served by keeping such persons for years in German prisons, even if as is done today on a large scale, they are utilized as labour for war purposes.’ Thierack explained to Bormann that Himmler’s police ‘can then carry out their measures untrammelled by the niceties of criminal law’. In spite of such dedication. Thierack was nonetheless criticized by Hitler for not being tough enough and for ‘sticking to his legalistic egg-shells’.