Roland Freisler rose from small-town lawyer to chief judge, prosecutor and jury at the Nazi Ministry of Justice, where he oversaw thousands of trials of opponents--both real and imagined--of the Nazi regime. A soldier in the German army during World War I, he was captured by the Russians and interned in Russia, where he embraced Communism and joined the German Communist Party upon his release after the war. He soon saw the writing on the wall, however, and switched allegiance to the Nazi Party, becoming one of its more brilliant legal minds. A well-regarded speaker with an innate grasp of the finer points of the law and the ability to use them to the party's advantage, he rose quickly through the ranks and was eventually appointed to head the Ministry of Justice. He became notorious for his unsparing use of the death penalty. Over 90% of all trials conducted by the Ministry of Justice during his reign ended in a death sentence--more than 5000 were handed down in trials conducted by the Ministry between 1942-45, 2600 of them by Freisler himself (many of which were decided upon before the trial was even held). He usually acted as not only the judge but also the prosecutor, and was infamous for his habit of leaping up, insulting, shouting, screaming at and otherwise humiliating defendants who appeared before him, and he often pronounced the death sentence with a wave of his hand and a dismissive "Off with his head". He had many of these trials filmed--often screaming so loudly at defendants that he would cause the microphones to blow out--so there is actually footage of him "in action".

Freisler was in the courthouse in Berlin on 2/3/1945 when waves of Allied bombers struck the city. He had taken refuge in the cellar when a bomb hit the courthouse. In what can only be regarded as poetic justice, the building in which he sentenced so many thousands to die collapsed on top of him, and a huge beam crushed him to death.

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Prozess 20. Juli 1944 vor dem Volksgerichtshof

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Roland Freisler

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