Wilhelm Stuckart

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Wilhelm Stuckart
Reich Ministry of the Interior
In office
1 April 1938 – 23 May 1945
ChancellorAdolf Hitler
Preceded byUnknown
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Personal details
Born(1902-11-16)16 November 1902
University of Frankfurt am Main
OccupationLawyer

Wilhelm Stuckart (16 November 1902 – 15 November 1953) was a German

Flensburg government at the end of the Second World War
.

Early life

Stuckart was born in

Trade Register"); he passed the bar examination in 1930.[3]

Career

From 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge.

Stettin, Pomerania.[3]

Stuckart's quick rise in the German state administration was unusual for a person of modest background and would have been impossible without his long dedication to the Nazi cause.

Welfenschatz") – a unique collection of early medieval religious precious metalwork, at that time in the hands of several German-Jewish art dealers from Frankfurt, and one of the most important church treasuries to have survived from medieval Germany – by the Prussian State under its Prime Minister Hermann Göring.[5]

On 7 July 1934, Stuckart became the State Secretary and head of the Central Office in the recently established

antisemitic Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law, together better known as the Nuremberg Laws, which the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed on 15 September 1935.[3][7] In 1936, Stuckart became a member of the Academy for German Law and chairman of its committee on administrative law.[8]

Part of Stuckart's duties in the Interior Ministry involved providing a legal framework justifying the Nazi expansionist policy under constitutional and international law. On 16 March 1938, Hitler charged him with the management of the office carrying out the unification of Austria with the Reich, and he drafted the implementing decree. He was formally promoted to State Secretary in the Interior Ministry on 1 April 1938. In October, he was similarly charged with administering the transfer of the Sudetenland and, in March 1939, drafted the decree on the formation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[8]

On 18 August 1939, Stuckart signed a confidential decree regarding the "Reporting Obligations of Deformed Newborns," which became the basis for the Nazi regime's euthanasia of children.[9] Two years later, Stuckart's own one-year-old son, Gunther, who was born with Down syndrome, became a victim of this programme.[10]

Stuckart was a member of the SA from 1932 and applied for membership in the SS in December 1933. On the recommendation of Heinrich Himmler, Stuckart finally transferred to the SS on 13 September 1936 (member number 280,042) with the rank of SS-Standartenführer. He was awarded the Golden Party Badge on 30 January 1939 and was promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer on 30 January 1944.[8]

As a legal theorist

A prolific writer, Stuckart came to be seen as one of the leading Nazi legal experts, focusing especially on racial laws and

anti-miscegenation legislation was justified, even necessary.[11] Stuckart stated that these laws represented "a preliminary solution of the Jewish question".[3]

In October 1939, Stuckart was tasked with investigating the comprehensive rationalization of the state administrative structure by

decentralisation and simplification.[4] The streamlining was to especially concern the field administration, which was to undergo extensive unification, preferably leading to a model of a small Interior Ministry supervising a single system of field agencies fielding broad local powers.[4] Stuckart proposed that the state and party should effectively be combined in an overarching concept of the Reich, and should co-operate at the highest levels of power, so that ground-level friction between the institutions could be solved by referencing upwards.[12] Stuckart and his disciples distinguished Herrschaft (administrative mastery) from an idealised Führung (leadership).[13]
The transformation of the state administration from a technical apparatus for the application of norms to a means of political leadership was the central idea in Stuckart's model: the ideal Nazi civil servant was not to be a passive lawyer of the obsolete "liberal constitutional state", but a "pioneer of culture, coloniser and political and economic creator".[12] The administrative structure of the Reichsgaue, where the party and state authorities were combined and the Gauleiter fielded almost dictatorial powers over his domain, reflected Stuckart's theorization.[4]

"Generalplan West"

German occupation of France during World War II.

A memorandum written on 14 June 1940 by Stuckart or someone in his vicinity in the Interior Ministry discusses the annexation of certain areas in

River Somme to the Jura Mountains (see map).[14] Because of the historical motivation for the area's Germanisation, cities and regions were to revert to their traditional German names. Nancy, for instance, would be known thereafter as Nanzig, and Besançon as Bisanz.[16] Historian Peter Schöttler refers to this plan as a western equivalent of the Generalplan Ost.[14]

Wannsee Conference

Stuckart later represented Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister, at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, which discussed the imposition of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the German Sphere of Influence in Europe".[3] According to the minutes of the conference, Stuckart supported forced sterilization for persons of "mixed blood" instead of extermination.[17]

Jewish grandparents) should be sterilized by force, after which they should be allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a "natural extinction".[18][19] He had stated:[18]

I have always maintained that it is extraordinarily dangerous to send German blood to the opposing side. Our adversaries will put the desirable characteristics of this blood to good use. Once the half Jews are outside of Germany, their high intelligence and education level, combined with their German heredity, will render these individuals born leaders and terrible enemies.

Stuckart was also concerned about causing distress to German spouses and children of 'interracial' couples.[19]

After World War II

Stuckart at the Ministries Trial, 1948

Stuckart served briefly as

Interior Minister in Karl Dönitz's "Flensburg Government" in May 1945.[20]

After

murder of the Jews even before the Wannsee Conference.[21] Stuckart's defense argued that his support for the forced sterilization of Mischlinge was to prevent or delay even more drastic measures.[21] The court was unable to resolve the question and sentenced him to time served in April 1949.[21]

After being released from captivity, Stuckart went to work as city treasurer in

de-Nazification court, classified as a "fellow traveller" (Mitläufer) and fined five hundred marks.[21]

Death

Stuckart was killed on 15 November 1953 near Hanover, West Germany, in a car accident a day before his 51st birthday. There has been widespread speculation that the "accident" was, in reality, a staged collision targeting Stuckart as a former Nazi involved in Nazi racial and anti-Jewish policies and activities. However, nothing has ever been openly admitted by Mossad or other groups known to have been involved in other attacks on former Nazis.[21]

Personality

Stuckart held firm opinions concerning racial legislation and administrative organisation.[4] At the Ministries Trial, his personal assistant Hans Globke described him as a "convinced Nazi" whose political faith weakened as time went on.[4] From May 1940 onward, Stuckart made several requests to be released from his job to military service in the Wehrmacht, but these were turned down personally by Hitler.[4]

Writings

  • Geschichte im Geschichtsunterricht, Frankfurt am Main 1934 ("A History of History Teaching")
  • Nationalsozialistische Rechtserziehung, Frankfurt am Main 1935 ("National Socialist Legal Studies")
  • Reichsbürgergesetz vom 15. September 1935. Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15. September 1935. Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes (Ehegesundheitsgesetz) vom 18. Oktober 1935. Nebst allen Ausführungsvorschriften und den einschlägigen Gesetzen und Verordnungen, with Hans Globke, Berlin 1936
  • Neues Staatsrecht, with Wilhelm Albrecht, Leipzig 1936 ("New State Law")
  • Nationalsozialismus und Staatsrecht, Berlin 1937 ("National Socialism and Constitutional Law")
  • Verwaltungsrecht, with Walter Scheerbarth, Leipzig 1937 ("Administrative Law")
  • Partei und Staat, Vienna 1938 ("The Party and the State")
  • Rassen- und Erbpflege in der Gesetzgebung des Dritten Reiches, with Rolf Schiedemair, Leipzig 1938 ("Racial and Hereditary Care in the Legislation of the Third Reich")
  • Die Reichsverteidigung (Wehrrecht), with Harry von Rosen, Leipzig 1940 ("Reich Defense (Military Law)")
  • Führung und Verwaltung im Kriege, Berlin 1941 ("Leadership and Administration During Wartime")
  • Europa den Europäern, 1941 ("Europe For Europeans")
  • Neues Gemeinderecht. Mit einer Darstellung der Gemeindeverbände, with Harry von Rosen, Leipzig 1942 ("New Municipal Law")
  • Verfassung, Verwaltung und europäische Neuordnung, Bukarest 1942 ("Constitution, Administration and the New European Order")
  • Verfassungs-, Verwaltungs- und Wirtschaftsgesetze Norwegens. Sammlung der wichtigsten Gesetze, Verordnungen und Erlasse, with Reinhard Höhn and Herbert Schneider, Darmstadt 1942 ("Constitutional, Administrative and Economic Laws of Norway. Collection of the Most Important Laws, Regulations and Decrees")
  • Der Staatsaufbau des Deutschen Reichs in systematischer Darstellung, with Harry von Rosen and Rolf Schiedermair, Leipzig 1943 ("The State Structure of the German Reich: A Systematic Presentation")

See also

Wilhelm Stuckart is portrayed by actor Peter Fitz in the 1984 German film and actor Colin Firth in the 2001 film.

References

  1. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich p.426, "Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior" (this is at the time of the Anschluss
    ).
  2. ^
    ISBN 0-7864-0792-1
    .
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Lehrer (2002), p. 172
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-85989-112-7
    .
  5. Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz
    , Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Vol. 23, Berlin 1987, p. 422.
  6. ISBN 978-1-78155-638-2
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-393-33761-7
    .
  8. ^ a b c Williams 2017, p. 276.
  9. ^ Jasch, Hans-Christian. "Civil Service Lawyers and the Holocaust: The Case of Wilhelm Stuckart." The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism and the Perversion of Justice. Ed. Alan Steinweis, Robert Rachlin. New York: Berghahn, 2013. 37–61.
  10. ^ Jasch (2013), p. 53
  11. ^
    ISBN 0-521-79266-5
    .
  12. ^ a b Noakes (1980), p. 45
  13. ^ Carl Hermann Ule, "Herrschaft und Führung im nationalsozialistischen Reich", in : Verwaltungsarchiv 45 (1940), pages 193–260.
  14. ^ a b c d Schöttler, Peter (2003). "'Eine Art "Generalplan West": Die Stuckart-Denkschrift vom 14. Juni 1940 und die Planungen für eine neue deutsch-französische Grenze im Zweiten Weltkrieg". Sozial.Geschichte (in German). 18 (3): 83–131.
  15. ^ Jäckel, E. (1966). Frankreich in Hitlers, Deutsche Vlg. p. 89
  16. ^ Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler, pp 688–689. Verlag Ulstein, 1973.
  17. ISBN 0-521-83875-4
    .
  18. ^ a b c Lehrer (2000), p. 82
  19. ^ a b Gruner (2006), p. 87
  20. ISBN 978-0465003389
    . Retrieved 28 April 2017.
  21. ^ a b c d e f g h Lehrer (2000), p. 173

External links

Political offices
Preceded by
Interior Minister of Germany

1945 		Succeeded by
none
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