Background
Wilhelm Frick was born on 12 March 1877 in Alsenz, in the Palatinate, the son of a Protestant schoolmaster.
Wilhelm Frick was born on 12 March 1877 in Alsenz, in the Palatinate, the son of a Protestant schoolmaster.
From 1896 to 1901 Frick studied law at Gotting¬en, Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate.
From 1904 to 1924 Frick worked in the Munich police as a government official, heading the political police section after 1919. Frick did not serve at the front during World War I.
After his participation in the Munich Beer-Hall putsch, Frick was arrested and sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment (suspended in 1924), but was nonetheless allowed to continue as head of the criminal section of the Munich police.
In 1924 Frick was elected as one of the first National Socialist deputies to the Reichstag and one year later was appointed head of its parliamentary faction.
On 23 January 1930 Frick became the first National Socialist Minister in a provincial government, responsible for education and the Ministry of the Interior in Thuringia. His actions in this post, which he held until 1 April 1931, gave an early foretaste of what the Nazi seizure of power would mean for the rest of Germany.
The police force was purged of officers with republican sympathies, Nazi candidates for office were illegally favoured, a special chair was created for the doyen of Nazi racists, Hans Gunther, at the University of Jena, the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front was banned, along with jazz music, and rabid militaristic, anti-semitic propaganda was allowed to flourish unchecked. Special German freedom prayers were instituted at Thuringian schools on Frick's instructions, which glorified the German Volk, its national honour and military power, while denouncing ‘traitors’ and ‘destroyers’.
When the Nazis came to power in January 1933 Frick was appointed Minister of the Interior, a key position which he held until August 1943, and he was directly responsible for measures taken against Jews, communists, Social Democrats, dissident churchmen and other opponents of the régime. His training as a jurist enabled him to cover Nazi crimes with a veil of pseudo-legalistic verbiage as he drafted and signed laws abolishing political parties, independent trade union organizations and all provincial legislatures, as well as sending some 100,000 opponents of the régime to concentration camps by 1935.
He was responsible for drafting and administering the laws that gradually eliminated the Jews from the German economy and public life, culminating in the Nuremberg race laws that reduced them to second-class citizenship in the Reich. It was Frick who framed the extraordinary law that declared all Hitler’s actions during the Blood Purge of the SA in June 1934 to be legal and statesmanlike. It was quickly passed by the puppet Reichstag in the spirit of Frick’s dictum that ‘Right is what benefits the German people, wrong is whatever harms them'. Although nominally Himmler’s superior, Frick singularly failed to impose any legal limitations on the power of the Gestapo and the SS, never seriously interfering with its encroach¬ments on his area of jurisdiction. As Minister of the Interior he failed to lift a finger to protect German Jewry from the atrocities inflicted during the Crystal Night pogrom of 9 November 1938.
By this time Frick’s importance had declined, since he had already fulfilled his main function of helping Hitler to consolidate his power legally, thus paving the way for the establishment of a totalitarian police state.
As Germany became fully militarized during World War II, Frick’s power was further reduced.
On 24 August 1943 he was appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, a position he held until the end of the war, though real authority was concentrated in the hands of his nominal subordinate, Karl-Hermann Frank. At the Nuremberg trial, Frick (who refused to testify) was charged and found guilty of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in concentration camps in the Protectorate. The dedicated Nazi bureaucrat and loyal implementer of Hitler’s ruthless aims was hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946.
He was an early sympathizer of the NSDAP and Hitler’s liaison man at Munich police headquarters in the early 1920s. Among his ‘services' to right-wing circles in this period was help to the ‘Feme’ murderers (Freikorps members) to escape capture.