At first glance, room 253 seems almost cosy. The wall paneling in honey-colored wood, small carvings on the bench, a long, plain wooden bench, across the hall. The comfort is deceptive. On April 19, 1943, exactly 80 years ago, 14 people sat on this wooden bench and they expected the worst. In front of them, raised three steps, was the People’s Court – the highest court under National Socialism, with its chairman Roland Freisler in his red robe, who had become the grimace of the unjust state: he shouted down the accused, insulted them, mocked them. Madly, he did what he considered his primary duty: to enforce Adolf Hitler’s will in the courtroom. The picture of the leader hung on the wall behind him.
The judgments of this court were final, they were effective immediately. And they were almost always fatal. In 1943 alone, the People’s Court imposed more than 1,500 death sentences, a total of more than 5,000. Freisler spoke three of them in room 253: against the young medical students Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf and against their mentor, the musicologist Professor Kurt Huber. They were all members of the “White Rose” resistance group, which demanded nothing more than freedom of expression and an end to the war.
Whoever enters this hall today first comes across a kind of metal heap of rubble, like a bolt of iron that has entered this hall. A flash that illuminates so many things: horror, arbitrariness, dressed in the robe of justice. But the flash shows even more: how the German, the Bavarian, the Munich judiciary went almost seamlessly into everyday life after these crimes. How judges who had handed down blood sentences returned to their posts in a very short time. While Nazi victims struggled for decades to be rehabilitated, Nazi judges were able to carry on as if they had never been guilty.
The judge’s widow was awarded a special pension
As late as 1985, the state of Bavaria granted Freisler’s widow, who lived in Munich, a special pension of 400 marks a month. The officials in the state welfare office assumed that her husband, the judicial criminal, would have made a career in the Federal Republic of Germany as a “lawyer or civil servant of the higher service” in the judiciary if he had not died in an air raid in 1945.
A new exhibition can now be seen in the middle of the Munich Palace of Justice, and actually it should have been shown there 70 years ago. It’s about how the judiciary dealt with the freedom fighters of the “White Rose”. But the main thing is that the judiciary did not deal with its own brown past for decades, not a single judge of the People’s Court was convicted by German courts. When the Berlin Regional Court tried one of the judges in 1967, the Federal Court of Justice overturned the verdict.
This memorial to the memory of judicial wrongs does not stand in a museum but in a living, working court. During the lunch break, the members of the criminal law department walk past, next door, in the room where Sophie and Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were convicted, law students are looking at files. This hall of the first White Rose Trial is no longer preserved in its original form. It has been rebuilt, the dome has been taken down, and the light-blue walls give no hint of the horror when Freisler sentenced the three young people to death within a day. They were arrested on February 18, 1943 and died under the guillotine in Stadelheim on February 22.
“What is right? What is wrong? What is law?”
The first thing anyone who climbs up to the second floor of the Palace of Justice at Munich Stachus sees is an inscription: “What is right? What is wrong? What is law?” And then the flyers of the “White Rose” fall towards you, as a light installation on the ceiling – those flyers that the Scholl siblings let sail down into the atrium of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. And were discovered by the caretaker. He denounced her. After the war, this man was classified as the “main culprit” and had to spend five years in a labor camp. The desk criminals mostly got off lightly, and in 1968 one of the former Nazi lawyers even got through an amnesty for all violent crimes in the Nazi Reich – except for murder. As a result, crimes could no longer be prosecuted for decades. The judiciary has only been investigating Nazi henchmen again for a few years, but the accused are now very old and hardly able to stand trial.
The hall in the Palace of Justice at the Stachus has been preserved almost true to the original. Only the picture of Hitler above the judge’s table was taken down.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
What it was like for the young people in the dock can now be felt very impressively in the hall of the second “White Rose” trial. It is preserved almost true to the original. Only the picture of Hitler above the judge’s table was taken down.
Falk Harnack, Katharina Schüddekopf, Susanne Hirzel – these three of the defendants wrote down the memories of that day, resulting in an impressive film, a graphic novel whose intensity is further enhanced by the absolute silence: Matthias Schardt’s pictures draw the court day after. The accused, as they sat on that bench, from early morning until 10:30 p.m., in fear of death. As they were led into the hall by two sergeants each, SA and SS men sat behind their necks and threatened them.
Freisler shouted at them from the front, the SA from behind. The court: two judges from the People’s Court, the assessors generals, party bigwigs, the concentrated power of the Nazi state. Freisler, as Susanne Hirzel, who was only 18 at the time, remembers, swept the law book that his assessor pushed to him onto the floor with a brusque gesture: “We don’t need any law books, this is where the National Socialist heart judges!”
There you can see the respected Professor Huber, who courageously faced Freisler, giving his last speech. “There is a final limit for all external legality, where it becomes untrue and immoral,” said Huber. “Then when it becomes the cloak of a cowardice that doesn’t dare to take action against obvious violations of the law. A state that prohibits any free expression of opinion and also subjects every morally justified criticism and every suggestion for improvement to the most terrible penalties is breaking an unwritten law, an unwritten right that must remain alive in popular sentiment.” Huber was mocked by Freisler. And sentenced to death.
Such a “gorgeous German girl” stands there
The Wehrmacht soldier Falk Harnack was surprisingly acquitted, as a cynical homage to the Führer’s birthday the next day. Four months earlier, Harnack’s brother had been executed as a resistance fighter in Berlin. The young Susanne Hirzel escaped death because her lawyer got into the minds of Freisler and his fellow judges. Such a “gorgeous German girl” is standing there, said the lawyer, and it would be a shame if “the heritage of this German family were diminished”. Which means: the Aryan gene pool would be weakened by a death sentence, the accused could no longer bring Aryans into the world. It worked.
Bavaria’s Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich, himself a former lawyer, came to the White Rose Hall shortly before the opening of the exhibition, and not for the first time. On the day he took office, he was here once before, in the evening, alone. At that time he sat down on the long dock, the edge of which cut into his shoulder blades, and he hesitated to climb the three steps to the judge’s bench. He had an “inner shyness,” says Eisenreich. You can feel a dark aura up there, as if Freisler had just left the hall. The chairs that are there date from that time, it is quite possible that Freisler clutched the wooden armrests while screaming. It is this “auratic effect” of the room that the exhibition organizers around the historian Henriette Holz and the creative Christian Hölzl wanted to preserve.
Heavy metal panels with inscriptions and photos lead towards the courtroom. They are symbols of the demolition of the rule of law.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
The path from the pompous staircase of the Palace of Justice to the White Rose Hall at the end of the corridor is lined with heavy metal panels. Step by step the records are getting harder and harder, step by step they are warped more, demolished: as a symbol for the demolition of the rule of law. The Nazis had destroyed it within a very short time, and the judiciary was willing to cooperate.
There is a lot of text to read, one is among lawyers. And that is what the newly designed exhibition is primarily aimed at. It should not just be a reminder, but encouragement to defend the law, especially in times when the rule of law is no longer unchallenged. In Poland, the government is trying to smash the independent judiciary, and in Israel citizens have been demonstrating against the alleged “judicial reform” for months. And in Germany, a judge is in prison because, according to the federal prosecutor, she tried to violently overthrow democracy with other right-wing extremists. “If the system shakes, the third power is required,” says Tobias Rottmeir, who oversees the exhibition at the Ministry of Justice.
The Nazis went through with the trials of the “White Rose” even after the Palace of Justice had already been bombed. They outsourced the third process to Donauwörth. In the fall of 1943, the chemistry student Hans Leipelt was sentenced to death there. He had collected money for Professor Huber’s widow.
At the end of the tour you will come across a mirror. “Democracy needs democrats” is written on it – and you can see yourself.