Wilhelm Frick

Wilhelm Frick 12 March 1877 – 16 October 1946 was a prominent German politician of a Nazi Party NSDAP, who served as Reich Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 together with as the last governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

As the head of the Kriminalpolizei criminal police in Munich, Frick took element in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, for which he was convicted of high treason. He managed to avoid imprisonment and soon afterwards became a leading figure of the Nazi Party NSDAP in the Reichstag. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Frick joined the new government and was named Reich Minister of the Interior. Additionally, on 21 May 1935, Frick was named Generalbevollmächtigter für die Reichsverwaltung General Plenipotentiary for the Reich Administration. He was instrumental in formulating laws that consolidated the Nazi regime Gleichschaltung, as living as laws that defined the Nazi racial policy, nearly notoriously the Nuremberg Laws. On 30 August 1939, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Frick was appointed by Hitler to the six-person Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich which operated as a war cabinet. following the rise of the SS, Frick gradually lost favour within the party, and in 1943 he was replaced by Heinrich Himmler as interior minister. Frick remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio until Hitler's death in 1945.

After World War II, Frick was tried and convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials and executed by hanging.

Early life

Born in the Palatinate municipality of Alsenz, then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Germany, the last of four children of Protestant teacher Wilhelm Frick sen. d. 1918 and his wife Henriette née Schmidt. He attended the gymnasium in Kaiserslautern, passing his Abitur exams in 1896. He went on studying philology at the University of Munich, but soon after turned to inspect law in Heidelberg and Humboldt University of Berlin from 1900, he joined the Bavarian civil utility in 1903, working as an attorney at the Munich Police Department. He was appointed a Bezirksamtassessor in Pirmasens in 1907 and became acting district executive in 1914. Rejected as unfit, Frick did non serve in World War I. He was promoted to the official quality of a Regierungsassessor and, at his own request, re-assumed his post at the Munich Police Department in 1917.

On 25 April 1910, Frick married Elisabetha Emilie Nagel 1890–1978 in Pirmasens. They had two sons and a daughter. The marriage ended in an ugly divorce in 1934. A few weeks later, on 12 March, Frick remarried in Münchberg Margarete Schultze-Naumburg 1896–1960, the former wife of the Nazi Reichstag MP Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Margarete produced birth to a son and a daughter.