...The Nazis believed that such relationships were dangerous because they led to “mixed race” children. According to the Nazis, these children and their descendants undermined the purity of the German race.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
On the 20th of January 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate and physical annihilation of the European Jews. Adolf Hitler had authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder at some still undetermined time in 1941.
At the time of this Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the Nazi regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia.
On the 20th of August 1942, Hitler named Freisler president of the People's Court.
Under Freisler's rule, the frequency of death sentences rose sharply. Approximately 90% of all cases that came before him ended in guilty verdicts. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 5,000 death sentences were decreed by him, 2,600 of these through the court's First Senate, which Freisler controlled. He was responsible in his three years on the court for as many death sentences as all other senate sessions of the court combined in the court's existence between 1934 and 1945.
When on the 18th of February 1943, Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl were distributing leaflets at the Ludwig Maximilian University, they were reported to the official secret police of Nazi Germany - the Gestapo and then arrested.
Roland Freisler sentenced them to death.
Another of Freisler’s victims was Elfriede Scholz, a sister of German-born novelist Erich Maria Remarque. After a failed bomb attempt to assassinate Hitler on his airplane, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters.
In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for conspirators which continued for months. In August 1944, some of the arrested perpetrators of the failed assassination were brought before Freisler for punishment. Hitler had ordered that those found guilty should be "hanged like cattle".
In the end more than 7,000 people were arrested. 4,980 of them were executed, often on the barest evidence.
Roland Freisler died on the 3rd of February 1945 when United States Army Air Forces bombers attacked Berlin.
