7144 - Wilhelm Frick Document Signed at Nuremberg, Denying Responsibility for Nazi Crimes in Occupied Territories

Wilhelm Frick Document Signed at Nuremberg, Denying Responsibility for Nazi Crimes in Occupied Territories Partly-printed DS, in German, signed “Frick,” one page, 8 x 12, January 18, 1946. Document headed (translated), "The International Military Tribunal, Defendant's Application for Summons for Witness," made while preparing his defense for the Nuremberg trials. Frick and his defense lawyer request testimony from "Stuckart," explaining: "He was the head of the central office in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. He is informed about the tasks and activities of this office. This office had no executive power in the occupied territories. Compared to the other ministries, it was a concentrating bureaucratic central office for the assimilation of laws." Frick attests that for these reasons, he "cannot be held responsible for occurrences in the occupied territories. He had no influence whatever over the executive organs, especially over the Police, in the occupied areas since it was not under his jurisdiction but entirely under the Reichsfuehrer SS." Signed at the conclusion in pencil by Wilhelm Frick, and countersigned by his defense counsel. Backed by lightweight cardstock and in fine condition, with a band of toning to the top. Frick's stated purpose was to establish that his ministry "had no executive power in the occupied territories," that it functioned merely as "a concentrating bureaucratic central office for the assimilation of laws," and that Frick therefore "can not be held responsible for occurrences in the occupied territories," since the police answered only to the Reichsführer-SS, not to him. The claim collapsed under its own weight. Wilhelm Stuckart, the witness Frick called to clear him, was himself a principal architect of the Nuremberg Race Laws and had attended the Wannsee Conference, making him a compromised character witness whose own documents were turned against Frick by the prosecution. The Tribunal rejected Frick's claim of total absolution outright, finding that Frick had personally authorized and signed the decrees that gave the Gestapo jurisdiction over concentration camps, extended his discriminatory laws into occupied Poland, and, as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from 1943, held ultimate administrative authority while thousands of Czech Jews were transported from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz. Judges at Nuremberg concluded that even where Frick left day-to-day enforcement to Himmler, he remained the 'legal architect' who built and extended the jurisdiction that made the killing possible.