Wilhelm Stuckart

Wilhelm Stuckart (16 November 1902 – 15 November 1953) was a German Nazi Party lawyer, official, and a State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry during the Nazi era.

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.

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.

Stuckart was a member of the SA from 1932 and applied for membership in the SS in December 1933.

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, 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 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.

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 one, but a born member of the German Volk, through which they acquire 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 represent a danger to the purity of the people's community.

As such, anti-miscegenation legislation was justified, even necessary.

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.

He was awarded the Golden Party Badge on 30 January 1939 and was promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer on 30 January 1944.

A prolific writer, Stuckart came to be seen as one of the leading Nazi legal experts, focusing especially on racial laws and public administration.

He was a co-author of the notorious Nuremberg Laws and a participant in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned.

He also served as Reichsminister of the Interior in the short-lived Flensburg government at the end of the Second World War.

Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden, the son of a railway employee.

He had a Christian upbringing.