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On this day in 1945 (a Saturday), British and American bombers began the last, and biggest, blitz of Berlin. It lasted until April 20, Hitler's birthday. The German central bank, with about $8 billion in gold and foreign currency (in today's money) was hit.
But the luckiest bomb killed Roland Freisler, head of the People's Court. Every lawyer and law student should learn about Freisler, and how the subtle corruption of law can turn justice into injustice.
Freisler as trained as a lawyer just before the outbreak of the First World War. He served in the army and, after the Armistace, resumed his legal training, then began to practice. Pre and post-First World War Germany was a rule of law state.
Freisler should have understood the role of honest courts and justice in a modern state. But Freiselr had spent time as a POW in Russia and returned to Germany as a confirmed Marxist and German nationalist. He was one of the small minority of leftists who were early Nazis.
Marxists had been purged by the late 1920s (the rest were killed off in the Night of the Long Knives) but Freisler was adaptable and the Nazis needed lawyers. (Nazis got more in the mid-1930s when they disbarred Jewish lawyers and distributed their practices, but that was later.)
Once the Nazis took power in 1933, Freisler was given an important position in the Prussian state justice ministry. He helped re-make German law to fit Nazism, and was appointed to head the People's Court, which handled political cases.
He was terrifying. A spectacular sociopath, Freisler had no qualms about heckling and verbally abusing accused enemies of the state, knowing that the verdict and sentence was already decided. Here's a short video:
Members of White Rose (students in Munich), the Kreisau Circle (Catholic aristocrats opposed to Hitler), and people directly or indirectly connected to the July 20, 1944 bombing of Hitler's headquarters and the mifired coup attempt that followed it ended up in front of Freisler.
Freisler's butchery continued to the day he died. In one version of the story of his death, he was hit when he went back to the courtroom to get a dossier. (The accused man, an army officer connected to the July 20 plot, actually survived the war.)
He bled out on the sidewalk on the Belvederestrasse. It seems no one worked too hard to save him. At the hospital, some nurses were heard saying Freisler was facing God's justice/
It would have been interesting to see how the Allies would have dealt with Freisler if they'd caught him. His most famous cases involved treason and attempted assaination in wartime, which are death penalty offences in most countries in wartime.
The fact that Freisler sentenced people to death knowing they'd be hanged on piano wire would have offended Allied judged.
I doubt he would have been freed, but he might have escaped the noose. The Allies did try Nazi judges after the war. Some got 20 year sentences, but all were released by the mid-1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judges%27_Trial
