Wilhelm Frick

Biography

Wilhelm Frick was born in 1877 in Alsenz in the Bavarian Palatinate, the son of a Protestant schoolteacher. After the Gymnasium in Kaiserslautern he studied philology in Munich and then law at Heidelberg and Berlin, taking a doctorate in law in 1901. He entered the Bavarian civil service in 1903 as a lawyer with the Munich police, served as a district official in Pirmasens, and returned to the Munich police in 1917, where he came to know Adolf Hitler and helped the early Nazi movement obtain permits for rallies.

As head of the political department of the Munich police he took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. Tried in 1924 for aiding high treason, he received a suspended sentence. He entered the Reichstag in May 1924 on the National Socialist Freedom Movement list, joined the refounded Nazi Party in 1925 and became leader of its Reichstag group in 1928. In January 1930 he became interior and education minister of Thuringia, the first Nazi to hold ministerial office in Germany, until a no-confidence vote removed him in April 1931.

When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Frick was named Reich Minister of the Interior. He drafted much of the legislation that brought the German states and institutions under Nazi control and that excluded Jews from public life, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and his ministry enforced the 1933 sterilisation law. Hitler made him a Reichsleiter in 1933, and in 1934 he also took over the Prussian interior ministry. His power waned as Heinrich Himmler built up the SS and police, and in August 1943 Himmler replaced him as interior minister.

Frick stayed in the cabinet without portfolio and served as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from 1943 until the German surrender in 1945. Tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, he declined to testify, was convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was hanged on 16 October 1946.