Wilhelm Stuckart

Early life

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 Epp in 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. To support his parents, Stuckart temporarily abandoned his studies to work at the Nassau Regional Bank in Frankfurt in 1924. He finished his studies in 1928, receiving a doctorate with a thesis entitled Erklärung an die Öffentlichkeit, insbesondere die Anmeldung zum Handelsregister ("Declarations to the Public, Especially Concerning the Enrollment to the Trade Register"); he passed the bar examination in 1930.

Career

From 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge. He renewed his association with the NSDAP and provided party comrades with legal counseling during this period. He 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'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. On 4 April 1933 he became the Mayor and State Commissioner in Stettin and was also elected to the state parliament and the Prussian State Council. On 15 May 1933, Stuckart was appointed Ministerial Director of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture, 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 Göring.

On 7 July 1934, Stuckart became the State Secretary and head of the Central Office in the recently established Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture under Bernhard Rust. However, after disagreements with his superior, he was placed on leave for disobedience in September and was involuntarily retired on 14 November 1934. He moved to Darmstadt, where he worked from February to March 1935 as the president of the superior district court. On 7 March 1935, Stuckart began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, Division I: Constitution and Legislation, with the responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship and racial laws. Promoted to Ministerial Director on 1 April 1935, he was on 13 September 1935 given the task of co-writing, together with Hans Pfundtner, Bernhard Lösener and Franz Albrecht Medicus , the 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. In 1936, Stuckart became a member of the Academy for German Law and chairman of its committee on administrative law.

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.

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 syndrome, became a victim of this programme.

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.

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". 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.

After World War II

Stuckart served briefly as Interior Minister in Karl Dönitz's "Flensburg Government" in May 1945.

After World War II, Stuckart was arrested, interned in Camp Ashcan, 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 Lösener 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 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 in Lower Saxony. In 1951 he was tried in a de-Nazification court, classified as a "fellow traveller" (Mitläufer) and fined five hundred marks.

Stuckart at the Ministries Trial in 1948

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.

Personality

Stuckart held firm opinions concerning racial legislation and administrative organisation. 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 several requests to be released from his job to military service in the Wehrmacht, but these were turned down personally by Hitler.