Career
From 1930 Stuckart served as a district court judge. It was during this period he renewed his association with the NSDAP and provided party comrades with legal counseling. He, however, did not rejoin the party immediately, as judges were prohibited from being politically active. To circumvent this restriction, Stuckart's mother joined the party for him, as member number 378,144. From 1932 to 1933 he worked as a lawyer and legal secretary for the SA in Stettin, Pomerania. Stuckart was a member of the SA from 1932 onward, and after the recommendation of Himmler, joined the SS on 16 December 1933 (member number 280,042), eventually reaching the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer in 1944.
Stuckart's quick rise in the German state administration was unusual for a person of modest background, and would have been impossible without his long dedication to the National Socialist cause. On 4 April 1933 he became the Mayor and State Commissioner in Stettin and was also a elected to the state parliament and the Prussian council of state. On 15 May 1933 Stuckart was appointed Ministerial Director of the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts, and on 30 June 1933 he was made a State Secretary. In 1934, Stuckart was intimately involved in the dubious acquisition of the Guelph Treasure of Brunswick (the "Welfenschatz") - a unique collection of early medieval religious precious metalwork, at that time in the hands of several German-Jewish art dealers from Frankfurt, and one of the most important church treasuries to have survived from medieval Germany - by the Prussian State under its Prime Minister Hermann Göring. Disagreements with his superior led Stuckart to leave the Ministry and move to Darmstadt, where he worked for a few weeks as the president of the superior district court. On 7 March 1935, Stuckart began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, Division I, with the responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship and racial laws. In this position he was given the task of co-writing together with Bernhard Lösener and Franz Albrecht Medicus the anti-Semitic Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law, together better known as the Nuremberg Laws, which were imposed by the Nazi-controlled Reichstag on 15 September 1935.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Stuckart
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