Wilhelm Frick Trial and Execution
Wilhelm Frick (12 March 1877 – 16 October 1946) was a prominent German politician of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), who served as Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 and as the last governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
As the head of the Kriminalpolizei (criminal police) in Munich, Frick took part 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 Minister of the Interior.
Additionally, on 21 May 1935, Frick was named Generalbevollmächtigter für die Reichsverwaltung (General Plenipotentiary for the Administration of the Reich).[2] He was instrumental in formulating laws that consolidated the Nazi regime (Gleichschaltung), as well as laws that defined the Nazi racial policy, most 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.
Frick was arrested, and was arraigned at the Nuremberg trials, where he was the only defendant besides Rudolf Hess who refused to testify on his own behalf.
Frick was convicted of planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and for his role, as Minister of the Interior, in formulating the Enabling Act and the Nuremberg Laws – laws under which people were deported to concentration camps, many of them being murdered there. Frick was also accused of being one of the most senior people responsible for the existence of the concentration camps.
Frick was sentenced to death on 1 October 1946, and was hanged at Nuremberg Prison on 16 October. Of his execution, journalist Joseph Kingsbury-Smith wrote:
The sixth man to leave his prison cell and walk with handcuffed wrists to the death house was 69-year-old Wilhelm Frick. He entered the execution chamber at 2.05 am, six minutes after Rosenberg had been pronounced dead.
He seemed the least steady of any so far and stumbled on the thirteenth step of the gallows. His only words were, "Long live eternal Germany", before he was hooded and dropped through the trap.
His body, along with those of the other nine executed men and the corpse of Hermann Göring, was cremated at the Ostfriedhof Cemetery in Munich, and the ashes were scattered in the river Isar.



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