Background
Roland Freisler was born on 30 October 1893 in Celle, the son of an old Hessian peasant family.
Roland Freisler was born on 30 October 1893 in Celle, the son of an old Hessian peasant family.
He had a younger brother, Oswald. In 1914 he was at law school when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies.
During his military service in World War I, Freisler was captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Siberia for several years. He learned to speak Russian fluently, became a Bolshevik Commissar and for a time a convinced communist - Hitler could never overcome his aversion to this aspect of Freisler’s past - until he escaped in 1920 and returned to Germany. After studying law at Jena, Freisler began to practise as a lawyer in Kassel in 1923, joining the Nazi Party a year later. In 1932 he was elected as a Nazi delegate to the Prussian legislature. In 1933 Freisler was also made head of the personnel department in the Prussian Ministry of Justice.
From 1934 to 1942 he was a State Secretary in the Ministry in charge of combating sabotage. A leading Nazi writer on the question of reforming the criminal law, Freisler was also a Prussian State Councillor and held the rank of SA-Brigadefuhrer. As State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice he participated in the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, which discussed the ‘Final Solution' of the Jewish problem in Europe.
In August 1942 he succeeded Thierack as President of the Volksgericht, a tribunal designed to provide speedy justice in cases of treason, defined broadly as any form of opposition to the ideology of the Third Reich. As the ‘People's Judge', Freisler proved himself a true sadist in legal robes, heaping vulgar abuse on prisoners before sending them to execution and fully justifying his reputation as the German Vyshinsky. The exceptional brutality and sarcasm, the vile taunts which he inflicted on the German generals, officers and other leaders implicated in the July plot of 1944, were actually recorded on soundtrack as part of a film made of the first of the bomb-plot trials: they showed Freisler to be an able pupil of the Soviet techniques used in the late 1930s against the Old Bolsheviks.
Freisler was killed by an Allied bomb in the cellar of the People’s Court on 3 February 1945 while presiding over another treason trial.
He was baptised as a Protestant on 13 December 1893.
Freisler's mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity and verbal force, in combination with his zealous conversion to National Socialist ideology, made him the most feared judge in Germany during the Third Reich, and the personification of Nazism in domestic law. However, despite his talents and loyalty, Adolf Hitler never appointed him to a government post beyond the legal system. This might have been attributable to the fact that he was a lone figure lacking support within the senior echelons of the Nazi hierarchy, and also partly that he had been politically compromised through family association with his brother Oswald Freisler, who was also a lawyer, who had appeared as the defence counsel in court against the Regime's authority several times in its programme of increasingly politically-driven trials with which it sought to enforce its tyrannical control of German society, and who had a habit of wearing his Nazi Party membership badge in court whilst doing so. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels reproved Oswald Freisler and reported his actions to Adolf Hitler, who in response ordered Freisler's expulsion from the Party. (Oswald Freisler committed suicide in 1939.) In 1941 in a discussion at the "Führer Headquarters" about whom to appoint to replace Franz Gürtner, the Reich Justice Minister, who had died, Goebbels suggested Roland Freisler as an option; Hitler's reply, in an echo of Freisler's "Red" past, was: "That old Bolshevik? No!"
Freisler married Marion Russegger on 24 March 1928. The marriage produced two sons, Harald and Roland.
Marion Russegger was born 10 February 1910 in Hamburg, the daughter of Bernhard Adolf Cajetan Russegger, a merchant in Hamburg and Bremen, and Cornelia Pirscher. On 24 March 1928, she married Roland Freisler, who was a lawyer and city councillor of the Nazi Party in Kassel at the time. They had two sons, Harald and Roland, and both were baptized. On 3 February 1945, her husband was killed during an Allied air raid in Berlin. In his will, dated 1 October 1944, Freisler had decreed that their two houses belonged to his wife.
After the war, Marion Freisler resumed her birth name Russegger and moved to Munich.
In 1985 there was a scandal about Russegger. In 1974, her pension was raised by about 400 Deutsche Mark. The explanation given by the pension office was that had her husband survived the war, and not been executed, disbarred, or imprisoned by the military tribunals of the allied countries, he presumably would have had a successful career as a lawyer or a senior judge. This decision was protested by a member of the Bavarian Landtag, but the move was rejected by the state government and there were no consequences for Marion Freisler. This was one of the last incidents connected with the problematic issue of social integration of National Socialist jurists in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early years.
In 1997, Marion Freisler was buried in Berlin, in the Russegger family plot, alongside her parents and her husband (Roland Freisler’s name is not on his gravestone).
