Nazi Career
In Munich, Frick witnessed the end of the war and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He sympathized with far-right Freikorps paramilitary units fighting against the democratic Bavarian government of Minister-president Kurt Eisner. Chief of Police Ernst Pöhner introduced him to Adolf Hitler, whom he helped willingly with obtaining permissions to hold political rallies and demonstrations.
Elevated to the rank of an Oberamtmann and head of the Kriminalpolizei security service from 1923, he and Pöhner participated in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch on November 9. Frick tried to suppress the State Police's operation, wherefore he was arrested and imprisoned, and tried for aiding and abetting high treason by the People's Court in April 1924. After several months in custody, he was given a suspended sentence of 15 months' imprisonment and was dismissed from his police job. Later during the disciplinary proceedings, the dismissal was declared unfair and revoked, on the basis that his treacherous intention had not been proven. Frick went on to work at the Munich social insurance office from 1926 onwards, in the rank of a Regierungsrat 1st class by 1933.
In the aftermath of the Putsch, Wilhelm Frick was elected a member of the German Reichstag parliament in the federal election of May 1924. He had been nominated by the National Socialist Freedom Movement, an electoral list of the far-right German Völkisch Freedom Party and the banned Nazi Party. On 1 September 1925, Frick joined the re-established NSDAP. He associated himself with the radical Gregor Strasser; making his name by aggressive anti-democratic and antisemitic Reichstag speeches, he climbed to the post of the Nazi parliamentary group leader (Fraktionsführer) in 1928.
On 23 January 1930 Wilhelm Frick was appointed State Minister of the Interior and of Education in the coalition government of Thuringia, being the first Nazi to hold any ministerial-level post in pre-Nazi Germany. He exploited his position to dismiss Communist and Social Democratic officials and to replace them with Nazi Party fellows, wherefore Thuringia's subsidies were temporarily suspended by Reich Minister Carl Severing. Frick also appointed the eugenicist Hans F. K. Günther a professor of social anthropology at the University of Jena, banned several newspapers as well as pacifist drama and film performances like All Quiet on the Western Front based upon the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. He was removed from office by a Social Democratic motion of no confidence in the Thuringian Landtag parliament on 1 April 1931.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Frick
Famous quotes containing the words nazi and/or career:
“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)