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Wilhelm Stuckart

Wilhelm Stuckart (16 November 1902 15 November 1953) was a Nazi Party
lawyer and official, a state secretary in the German Interior Ministry and later, a
convicted war criminal.
Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden, the son of a railway employee. He had a Christian
upbringing. Stuckart was active in the far right early on, and joined the Freikorps von
Eppin 1919 to resist the French occupation of the Ruhr. In 1922 he started studying
law and political economy at the universities of Munich and Frankfurt am Main, and
joined the Nazi Party in December that year; he remained a member until the party
was banned after the failed putsch of 1923. In order to support his parents, Stuckart
had to abandon his studies temporarily and work in the Nassau Regional Bank in
Frankfurt in 1924. He finished his studies in 1928, receiving a doctorate with a thesis
entitled Erklrung an die ffentlichkeit, insbesondere die Anmeldung zum
Handelsregister ("Explanations to the Public, Especially Concerning the Enrollment
to the Trade Register"); he passed the bar examination in 1930.
From 1930 Stuckart served as a district court judge. It was during this period he
renewed his association with the NSDAP and provided party comrades with legal
counseling. He, however, did not rejoin the party immediately, as judges were
prohibited from being politically active. To circumvent this restriction, Stuckart's
mother joined the party for him, as member number 378,144. From 1932 to 1933 he
worked as a lawyer and legal secretary for the SA in Stettin, Pomerania. Stuckart
was a member of the SA from 1932 onward, and after the recommendation of
Himmler, joined the SS on 16 December 1933 (member number 280,042),
eventually reaching the rank of SS-Obergruppenfhrer in 1944.
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 National Socialist cause. On 4 April 1933 he became the Mayor and State
Commissioner in Stettin and was also an elected to the state parliament and the
Prussian council of state. On 15 May 1933 Stuckart was appointed Ministerial
Director of the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts, and on 30 June 1933 he
was made a State Secretary. In 1934, Stuckart was intimately involved in the
dubious acquisition of the Guelph Treasure of Brunswick (the "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 Gring. Disagreements with his
superior led Stuckart to leave the Ministry and move to Darmstadt, where he worked
for a few weeks as the president of the superior district court. On 7 March 1935,
Stuckart began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, Division I, with the
responsibility for constitutional law, citizenshipandracial laws. In this position he was

given the task of co-writing together with Bernhard Lsener and Franz Albrecht
Medicus the anti-Semitic Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law, together better known as the Nuremberg
Laws, which were imposed by the Nazi-controlled Reichstag on 15 September 1935.
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. Two years later, Stuckart's own one-year-old son, Gunther,
who was born with Down's syndrome, became a victim of this program.
A prolific writer, Stuckart came to be seen as one of the leading Nazi legal experts,
focusing especially on racial laws and public administration. In 1936 Stuckart, as the
chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, together with
Hans Globke co-authored the government's official Commentary on German Racial
Legislation in elaboration of the Reich Citizenship and Blood Protection Laws. The
commentary explains that the laws were based on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft
("People's community") to which every German was bound by common blood. The
individual was not a member of society, a concept viewed by the Nazi legal theorists
as a Marxist liberal one, but a born member of the German Volk, through which he
or she acquires rights. Interests of the Volk were to always override those of the
individual. People born outside of the Volk were seen to possess no rights, and in
fact to represent a danger to the purity of the people's community. As such, antimiscegenation legislation was justified, even necessary. Stuckart stated that these
laws represented "a preliminary solution of the Jewish question".
In October 1939 Stuckart was given the task of investigating the comprehensive
rationalization of the state administrative structure by decentralization and
simplification. 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 wide local
powers. Stuckart proposed that the state and party should effectively be combined
in an overarching concept of the Reich, and co-operate at the highest levels of
power, so that ground-level friction between the institutions could be solved by
referencing upwards The transformation of the state administration from a technical
apparatus for the application of norms to a mean 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 bygone "liberal constitutional state", but a "pioneer of culture, coloniser
and political and economic creator". 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.
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 Eastern France to
the German Reich. The document presents a plan to weaken France by reducing
the country to its late mediaeval borders with the Holy Roman Empire and replacing
the French populace of the annexed territories by German settlers. This
memorandum formed the basis for the so-called "north-east line" (also called the
"black line" and the "Fhrer line") drawn in the occupied French territories after the
Second Armistice at Compigne, which stretched from the mouth of the River
Somme to the Jura Mountains (see map). 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
Besanon as Bisanz. Historian Peter Schttler refers to this plan as a western
equivalent of the Generalplan Ost.

German occupation of France during World War II.

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".
According to the minutes of the conference, Stuckart supported forced sterilization
for persons of "mixed blood" instead of extermination.
Reinhard Heydrich called a follow-up conference on 6 March 1942, which further
discussed the problems of "mixed blood" individuals and mixed marriage couples. At
this meeting, Stuckart argued that only first degree Mischlinge (persons with two
Jewish grandparents) should be sterilized by force, after which they should be
allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a "natural extinction". He had stated:
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.
Stuckart served briefly as Interior Minister in Karl Dnitz's "Flensburg Government"
in May 1945.
After World War II, Stuckart was arrested and tried by the Allies in the Ministries Trial
for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws. The court characterized
him as an ardent Jew-hater, who was able to pursue his anti-Semitic campaign from
the safety of his ministerial office. Former co-worker Bernhard Lsener from Interior
Ministry testified that Stuckart had been aware of the murder of the Jews even
before the Wannsee Conference. Stuckart's defense argued that his support for the
forced sterilization of Mischlinge was in order to prevent or delay even more drastic

measures. The court was unable to resolve the question, and sentenced him to time
served in April 1949.
After being released from captivity, Stuckart went to work as city treasurer in
Helmstedt and then as the manager of the Institute for the Promotion of Economy
inLower Saxony. In 1951 he was tried in a de-Nazification court, classified as a
"fellow traveller" (Mitlufer) and fined five hundred marks.
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, although nothing has
ever been openly admitted by Mossad or other groups known to have been involved
in other attacks on former Nazis.
Stuckart held firm opinions concerning racial legislation and administrative
organisation in spite of strong opposition to them among the various political forces
active in the Nazi regime. At the Ministries Trial, his personal assistant Hans Globke
described him as a "convinced Nazi", whose political faith weakened as time went
on. From May 1940 onward Stuckart made a number of requests to be released
from his job to military service in the Wehrmacht, but these were turned down
personally by Hitler.
SS Career:

SS-Standartenfhrer, September 1936.

SS-Oberfhrer, January 1937.

SS-Brigadefhrer, January 1938.

SS-Gruppenfhrer, January 1942.

SS-Obergruppenfhrer, January 1944.

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