Stuckart Co-Authored Infamous Nuremberg Laws

Wilhelm Stuckart was invited to Wannsee Conference for purely political reasons – to represent Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick who was the nominal boss of Heinrich Himmler (in the latter’s capacity of Chief of German Police) and at the time of the conference still yielded significant power.

However, there was another – personal – rationale for inviting Stuckart: he co-authored infamous Nuremberg Laws that formed the foundation for the whole “Holocaust Project” (they defined who was the Jew – and who wasn’t).

Stuckart was no stranger to violence: he was active in the militant far right early on and joined the Freikorps von Epp in 1919 (at the age of 17) 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 NSDAP in December that year.

He finished his studies in 1928, receiving a doctorate in law. From 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge and in 1932-33 he worked as a lawyer and legal secretary for the SA in Stettin (today, Szczecin in Poland).

Then he went into politics as many lawyers did in many countries at all times (they still do). On April 4, 1933 he became the Mayor and State Commissioner in Stettin and later was elected to the state parliament and the Prussian State Council.

On May 15, 1933, Stuckart was appointed Ministerial Director of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture (of all offices), and on June 30, 1933, he was promoted to State Secretary.

Two years later, he moved to Reich Ministry of Interior, Division I: Constitution and Legislation, with the responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship and racial laws (hence his co-authorship of Nuremberg laws).

Stuckart was no stranger to serial mass murder either: in August 1939, he 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 program (with Stuckart’s full consent).

A prolific writer, Stuckart came to be seen as one of the leading Nazi legal experts, focusing especially on racial laws. In 1936 Stuckart, as the chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, he 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 these racist laws were based on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (“People’s community”) to which every German was bound by common blood (the essence of National Socialism).

Individuals were not members of society (unlike in fascist regimes) but members of the German Volk, through which they acquire citizenship rights. Interests of the Volk were always superior to 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. Stuckart stated that these laws represented “a preliminary solution of the Jewish question”.

His views on the Final Solution were surprisingly mild given his background in political violence and in serial mass murder of Aktion T4. According to the minutes of the conference, Stuckart supported forced sterilization for persons of “mixed blood” (half-Jewish) instead of extermination.

Heydrich called a follow-up conference on March 6, 1942, which further discussed the problems of “mixed blood” individuals and mixed marriage couples.[18] 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”.

Stuckart served briefly as Interior Minister in Karl D;nitz’s Flensburg Government in May 1945. When that government was dissolved by the Allies, Stuckart was arrested and subsequently called as an expert witness at the IMT Nuremberg trial.

Stuckart himself was tried by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Ministries Trial in 1948 for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws. The court described 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 L;sener from Interior Ministry testified that Stuckart had been aware of the murder of the Jews even before the Wannsee Conference (which was most likely true).

However, there was no definitive evidence of his role of the Holocaust so he was sentenced to time served in April 1949. In 1951, he was tried in a de-Nazification court, classified as a “fellow traveler” and fined 500 Deutsche Mark.

Stuckart was killed on 15 November 1953 near Hanover, West Germany, in a car accident a day before his 51st birthday. There were rumors that he was killed by Jewish avengers but no evidence of that had ever surfaced.