Wilhelm Stuckart ( Wiesbaden , Germany , 16 of November of 1902 - 15 of November of 1953 ) was a politician and German lawyer, member of Nazism , who served as an official of the Ministry of Interior of the Third Reich and contributed ideas on the Wannsee Conference To facilitate the Holocaust .
Biography
Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden , the son of a railroad employee, into a family of Christian tradition. From his youth Stuckart was in favor of the extreme right and in 1919 joined the Freikorps military veteran Franz Ritter von Epp to fight against the French occupation of the Ruhr . In 1922 Stuckart studied law and political economy at the universities of Munich and Frankfurt am Main and in December of the same year joined the Nazi Party , which remained affiliated until that party was banned after the putsch of 1923 . In 1924 Stuckart worked for a bank after leaving his studies temporarily, but in 1928 managed to graduate and passed the exam to practice law in 1930.
Exercising the lawyer was appointed district judge from 1930 and on that date restarts its link with the NSDAP , but without formally registering as it prohibited his status as judge. Between 1932 and 1934, Stuckart was legal counsel to the SA in Stettin , Pomerania ) and was officially registered in it from 1932; After a recommendation from Heinrich Himmler , Stuckart joined the SS on December 16, 1933 (reaching the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer in 1944.
During the Third Reich
While the political background of Stuckart were not brilliant, his devout dedication to the Nazi movement allowed inserted into the elite of the public administration of the Third Reich . Thus, after Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933 , Stuckart was appointed mayor and state commissioner in Stettin, becoming minister of the Prussian government on June 30 of the same year. After disagreements with other bureaucrats, Stuckart moved to Darmstadt , where he served as president of the district court for a few weeks, until March 7, 1935 began working in the Ministry of Interior of the Reich as specialist “” Division 1, “in charge of constitutional law , citizenship and racial laws , there drafted the” Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor “and the” Reich Citizenship Act “which would serve as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws passed on 15 Of September of 1935 . The 18 of August of 1939 Stuckart wrote and signed the decree on “Obligation to Report Neonates Deformes” that supported the Nazi program of euthanasia on children; In 1941 the own son of Stuckart new born with Down syndrome would be victim of this program.
After the German triumph in the Battle of France , Stuckart wrote the “General Plan West” destined to execute a long term policy with which it would decisively weaken to France , annexing certain regions to Germany (as it did with Alsace and Lorena , and imposing A brutal Germanization of other regions of the north and east of France that had been linked to the Holy Roman Empire or that were of economic utility for Germany, replacing the local population with German settlers, until France was reduced to its medieval borders.
In January 1942 Stuckart represented the Minister of the Interior, the Nazi Wilhelm Frick , at the Wannsee Conference which imposed the ” Final Solution ” of the ” Jewish problem in Germany ” by mass extermination of the Jews, giving rise to the Holocaust . At that conference and its continuations in March 1942, Stuckart required the first-degree Mischlinge (Germans with a maximum of two Jewish grandparents) to be sterilized by force until they were “naturally extinguished,” in order that the enemies of the Reich would not take advantage of its “German genetic load”, being advisable to exterminate the Mischlinge of other grades.
Legal Theorizations
Within his legal functions, Stuckart emphasized like theoretical of the legal rules of the Reich imposing like criterion that the laws in Nazi Germany should always be based on the concept of “national community” or Volksgemeinschaft to which all the ethnic Germans were linked by Racial links. On the basis of this premise, Stuckart claimed that the individual was not a member of a society because this idea was called Marxist , but the individual was a member of a “nation” by which the individual acquired (or lost) certain rights. The interests of the Volksgemeinschaft should predominate over the individual’s own rights, whereas individuals outside the Volksgemeinschaft should be perceived as a danger to the individual, being necessary that such subjects be deprived of rights. These ideas were the basis of the racial laws of Nazism.
Other legal theorizations of Stuckartt indicated that the public administration of the Reich should maintain a system of coordination and cooperation with the Nazi Party , so that the bureaucrat would not merely serve as the executor of administrative decisions but rather be a ” political and economic creator ” within Of the Nazi ideology, transforming the bureaucracy into an apparatus of political leadership.
Last years
After the fall of Berlin in April 1945 , Stuckart was summoned by Admiral Karl Dönitz to form part of the ephemeral government of Flensburg as “Minister of the Interior”. Stuckart was arrested by the British and undergoing a process to promote the Holocaust from his ministerial charge. He was sentenced to prison and released in April 1949 . In 1951 a German denazification court dismissed him as a Nazi route companion , but not as a leader or ideologue of the Third Reich.
After being free, Stuckart obtained work in Helmstedt like municipal treasurer, but died the 15 of November of 1953 in a car accident, without that it had been discovered that this event was “provoked” by some antinazi group in spite of the initial suspicions about it .
References
- Biography at Shoa.de
- Die Mitwirkung der Juristen an der Wannsee-Konferenz , by Peter Weber on the “Nazi legality” in the face of the Holocaust