Wilhelm Frick

Dr. Wilhelm Frick (March 12, 1877 – October 16, 1946) was a prominent German politician of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), who served as Reich 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.

Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years.

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 Reich Minister of the Interior. 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.

Quotes

• Long live eternal Germany!
  • Last words, 10/16/46, quoted in "The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War II" - Page 565 - by Jon E. Lewis - History - 2002

• Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years.
  • To Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn - History - 2007

• It was sad. It's war. Many others died, too. It's war.
  • About the death of his son, to Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn - History - 2007

• I am skeptical about preventing wars. I doubt if they can be prevented. There will always be wars. Judging by past experiences, working for peace now would be as ineffective as ever. It's a law of nature.
  • To Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn - History - 2007

I am skeptical about preventing wars. I doubt if they can be prevented. There will always be wars. Judging by past experiences, working for peace now would be as ineffective as ever. It's a law of nature.

Quotes about Frick

• Personally, he is not particularly depressed, because of the "nature of life, the laws of nature, the ways of war."
  • Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946

• In the testimony of each defendant, at some point there was reached the familiar blank wall: Nobody knew anything about what was going on. Time after time we have heard the chorus from the dock: "I only heard about these things here for the first time."
  These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. … A minister of interior who knew not even what went on in the interior of his own office, much less the interior of his own department, and nothing at all about the interior of Germany. … Frick, the ruthless organizer, helped the party to seize power, supervised the police agencies to insure that it stayed in power, and chained the economy of Bohemia and Moravia to the German war machine.
  • Robert H. Jackson, summarizing the characteristic claims of major Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials, and Frick's among these, in relation to what he actually did. Nuremberg trials (26 July 1946)