And finally, the last doctor of Wannsee on the list from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington – Roland Freisler. Freisler was born in Celle in 1893, and after school in Kassel, he studied law at the University of Jena (like Lange). For most of the First World War he was a Russian prisoner of war, but on his release he continued his law studies at Jena, being awarded his doctorate (on ‘The Basics of Company Organisation’) in 1922. Two years later he set up a legal practice in Kassel with his brother, soon establishing a reputation for defending extreme right-wing clients (especially new Nazi and SA activists). He also became a city councillor there in 1924, joined the Nazi Party and began his rapid rise in the movement, becoming deputy gauleiter of Hessen-Nassau-Nord.
By 1930 he’d established a national reputation as the Nazi leader in Kassel and ‘an incorrigible enemy of the Jews’. He became a member of the Prussian Parliament in 1932, and the Reichstag a year later. On Hitler’s coming to power he was appointed state secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Justice, and in 1934 he was promoted again, to state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice, moving with his family to Berlin. As well as his legal responsibilities – for policy on penal legislation and execution of sentences – he lectured and published widely, advocating that ‘German criminal law should serve the preservation of the German people and the safeguarding of the National Socialist state’. He also became a prominent proponent of race laws, heading a legal delegation to Italy in 1938, and meeting Mussolini, congratulating the Italian leader on passing such laws. On his return from Rome in November 1938, just three days after Kristallnacht, he participated in Goering’s meeting to discuss the resolution of the ‘Jewish question’, along with Stuckart, Neumann, Heydrich, Müller and Eichmann.
In the first years of the war, Freisler became more and more preoccupied with developing ever harsher laws against Jews and Poles, arguing that the death penalty was the appropriate punishment for even minor offences. Only days before the Wannsee meeting he’d written that he expected judges and attorneys in Poland to ‘feel like soldiers in the political troop of German ethnicity’. Heydrich regarded him and Stuckart as the two most senior juridical authorities, who would lend a spurious veneer of ‘legality’ to the discussions on the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’.
My continued digging into the backgrounds of these men produced only limited information, although I did discover that there was in fact another attendee of Wannsee who had a doctorate (missing from the original list at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington).
This man was Dr Gerhard Klopfer. Born into a farming family in Silesia in 1905, he studied law in Breslau and Jena (like Stuckart and Freisler before him), and completed his doctorate in 1929 (on ‘The True Duty of the Employee in the Employment Relationship’). He became a junior judge in Düsseldorf in 1931, joining the Nazi Party two years later. After a short period on the planning staff of the Prussian Gestapo, in 1935 he joined the staff of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, where his career really took off. His immediate boss here was Martin Bormann, then Hess’s chief of staff, who thought highly of the young lawyer and soon appointed him as his personal aide. Here Klopfer worked on issues of co-ordination between the Nazi Party and the state. In 1938, promoted now to ministerial secretary, he developed policies on the expropriation of Jewish businesses.
In May 1941, following Hess’s flight to Scotland and capture, the office was renamed the Party Chancellery, and Bormann was appointed its head, with Klopfer his deputy. Klopfer became a highly important liaison figure between the party Chancellery and the Reich Chancellery, where he had weekly meetings, ensuring Hitler’s decrees were smoothly enacted. His wide brief also included issues of constitutional law and he headed the unit on ‘Race and National Character’ as well. In this capacity he was a leading voice in debates over the definition of how ‘Jewishness’ should be measured. His view was that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 did not go far enough, and that laws on the issue of the ‘Mischlinge’ (Jews of mixed race – i.e of combined Jewish and Aryan ancestry) needed to be tightened. He was also one of the editors, together with Stuckart and others, of the journal Reich, Volksordnung, Lebensraum in autumn 1941. As well as being one of the most senior bureaucrats in the Reich, Klopfer also had a parallel rank in the SS, eventually rising to become Gruppenführer. Although ideologically a ‘pure’ Nazi, and highly qualified to speak on issues of race and the Jews, Klopfer’s invitation to the Wannsee Conference, as Bormann’s deputy, would not have been a simple matter for Heydrich – because of his own rivalry and difficult relationship with Bormann, and questions of territorial claim over which agency would be given the power to organise the ‘Final Solution’.
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Perhaps the single most striking feature of these eight men’s biographies, these eight men who sat down to discuss how genocide could be co-ordinated, is that seven of them had trained as lawyers. With the exception of Lange and Schöngarth, these men never killed directly, and never witnessed killing with their own eyes. Indeed most of them rarely left their offices in Wilhelmstrasse, where the majority of the ministries were based, yet, from their desks, they made a critical contribution to the extermination of 6 million human beings. The fact that all of these men spent so many of their formative years at universities unsettles me to a degree that I find hard to express.
My disquiet may be connected to the fact that my grandfather and father were both academics, and I grew up with a feeling of great affection for all that universities represented – not just in the narrow sense of the gaining of qualifications but rather the process of opening yourself to the world that real learning and enquiry involves – the meeting of minds, the spirit of scepticism. So, discovering that these men – presumably like numerous other intelligent, young people growing up in Germany in the 1920s – had gone through the experience of university, and emerged with extreme authoritarian, nationalist and racist views was shocking to me. I would not have been so surprised had they been studying in the mid-1930s, when Nazism had already taken control of all the institutions of Germany, but the fact that they were at university in a decade when the progressive Weimar Republic and international movements such as the Bauhaus were in the ascendancy, when feminism was making great advances, more than anywhere else in Europe (equal education rights for men and women, equal pay in professions) – this seems to defy easy explanation.
Yet the further I’ve researched, the more examples I’ve found of links between the intelligentsia and genocidal institutions of the Third Reich – highly educated graduates, doctors and professors figure in senior positions in many of the agencies which participated in mass murder. To give just a single example, many of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were drawn from academia. Einsatzgruppe A (responsible for more than 360,000 killings in total) was headed by Dr Walter Stahlecker (doctorate in law from the University of Tübingen). Einsatzgruppe C (responsible for almost 120,000 killings) was commanded by Dr Otto Rasch (holder of two doctorates – one in law, the other political economy), and later by Ernst Biberstein (a former Protestant pastor who had studied theology); also working at high levels in Einsatzgruppe C were Dr Erwin Weinmann (medical degree from the University of Tübingen) and Dr Max Thomas (who had a medical degree and specialised in psychiatry). A commander in Einsatzgruppe D, responsible for the killing of 14,300 Jews in three days at Simferopol in Crimea, was Dr Werner Braune (who held a doctorate in civil law from the University of Jena). And the head of Einsatzgruppe D (responsible overall for more than 90,000 killings) was Dr Otto Ohlendorf. He, before the war, had studied economics and law and had held the post of research director of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy – a life of academia behind him.