Background
Wilhelm Stuckart was born m Wiesbaden on 16 November 1902.
Wilhelm Stuckart was born m Wiesbaden on 16 November 1902.
Studied law in Munich and Frankfurt.
Stuckart fought in the Epp hreikorps and was twice imprisoned by the French authorities for opposition activities. An early member of the NSDAP (1922) he became a legal adviser to the Party in Wiesbaden in 1926.
Because of his political affiliations he had to resign as a judge in 1932, but within a year he became acting Mayor of Stettin and shortly after was appointed State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Education and a member of the Prussian State Council.
On 2 March 1935 Stuckart became Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and a few months later co-authored and promoted the Nuremberg anti-Jewish racial laws which placed German Jewry outside the national community. Together with Dr Hans Globke he edited an authoritative commentary on these laws, Kommentare zur Deutschen Rassengesetzgebung (1936), which expounded the volkisch concept of the State and developed the theme that the Third Reich ‘is the German Volk idea become reality’. A leading constitutional expert and loyal SS man - in January 1944 he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenfuhrer - Stuckart wrote several works on National Socialist legal theory and tactics.
In January 1942 he attended the Wannsee Conference where he responded enthusiastically to the plans for a ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question', proposing the compulsory sterilization of non-Aryans and the dissolution of all mixed' marriages. Stuckart, who was also Chairman of the ‘Commission for the Protection of German Blood’, had a reputation even more severe than that of Heydrich on racial matters.
Following his arrest in 1945, the Nuremberg court, lacking relevant documentation, accepted Stuckart's completely false claim that he knew nothing of the extermination programme and sentenced him in 1949 to four years’ imprisonment, the term he had already spent in detention since the war. Stuckart was immediately released, living subsequently in West Berlin. He was killed in a car ‘accident' near Hannover in December 1953, most probably the victim of a vengeance squad organized after the war to hunt down Nazi criminals.
