The beam came down with no warning. One moment, Roland Freisler was screaming at a defendant from the bench of the People’s Court, his voice the instrument of Nazi terror. The next, a slab of falling masonry had crushed him. The judge who had sent hundreds to their deaths lay dead in his own courtroom, his fingers still wrapped around the file of the man he was about to execute.
Fabian von Schlabrendorff sat just meters away, unharmed. He had been in front of Freisler that Saturday morning, February 3rd, 1945, charged with complicity in the plot to kill Hitler. The American bombing raid that killed the court’s president was the only thing that had saved him from a death sentence. But he was a man who had been courting death for years.
In the winter of 1943, on a frozen airfield at Smolensk, he had handed a parcel to a fellow officer boarding Hitler’s plane. It was wrapped to look like two bottles of Cointreau, a gift between comrades. Inside was a time bomb set to detonate thirty minutes after takeoff. The flight was short, the cold intense, and the chemical fuse froze in the unheated luggage hold.
The bomb never went off. Schlabrendorff flew to East Prussia the next day, retrieved the package before anyone could open it, and slipped back into his duties as adjutant to Colonel Henning von Tresckow at Army Group Center. No one suspected a thing. Born into a Prussian aristocratic family in 1907, he had trained as a lawyer before the war.
Posted to the Eastern Front in 1941, he quickly became the secret bridge between the conspirators in the army and the plotters in Berlin. For years, he carried messages in uniform, passing between the front lines and the men who were planning to remove Hitler. When Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded in Hitler’s briefing room on July 20th, 1944, the coup attempt collapsed within hours. Hitler survived.
Von Tresckow, his closest ally, took his own life the next day rather than face capture. Schlabrendorff was arrested in mid-August, dragged into the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, and tortured for weeks. They wanted names. He gave them none.
The Gestapo drove spikes through his hands. They beat him until he could barely stand. Through it all, he said nothing. In the cells around him sat Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster, the former head of military intelligence and his deputy.
Carl Goerdeler, the conspirators’ pick for Chancellor, was somewhere in the same wing. By autumn, Freisler had begun his show trials, sending the plotters to the gallows in proceedings filmed for Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine. Goerdeler was executed on February 2nd, 1945. Von Schlabrendorff was next.
The bombing raid that killed Freisler was one of the heaviest American daylight attacks of the war. It tore a hole in the roof of the courtroom, and a falling beam ended the life of the man who had been about to end his. The next morning, when the file was pried from Freisler’s dead hand, the trial was simply postponed. A month later, it reopened under Wilhelm Crohne, Freisler’s deputy.
Von Schlabrendorff conducted his own defense. He argued that the torture he had suffered made the proceedings so unjust that they could not stand. In a verdict the People’s Court almost never issued, Crohne’s court acquitted him on March 16th, 1945. Acquittal did not mean freedom.
He was shuffled from Sachsenhausen to Flossenbürg to Dachau, and finally moved to the Tyrol in late April with about 140 other prominent prisoners. The SS guards escorting the column were intercepted by a regular Wehrmacht unit, and the SS commander in northern Italy ordered them to stand down. On May 5th, 1945, the US Fifth Army liberated the group. A man the regime had tried to execute had become one of its most important witnesses.
He wrote analyses of Wehrmacht and Nazi war crimes for the Office of Strategic Services. When the OSS head, William Donovan, joined the American delegation preparing the Nuremberg trials, von Schlabrendorff came with him. The system that had tried to kill him was about to be tried itself. The men at the top were already out of reach.
Justice Minister Franz Gürtner had died of natural causes in 1941. Freisler was dead. Otto Thierack, who had succeeded the acting minister Franz Schlegelberger in 1942, was captured by the British and took his own life in an internment camp in October 1946. So the Americans settled for the men beneath them.
In March 1947, a military tribunal at Nuremberg put sixteen men in the dock: nine former Justice Ministry officials and seven judges and prosecutors from the People’s Court and special courts. The senior defendant was Schlegelberger himself, who had run the ministry for years after Gürtner’s death. Among them stood Oswald Rothaug, the Nuremberg special court judge who had sentenced a Jewish merchant, Leo Katzenberger, to death on charges of “racial defilement. ” The tribunal’s judgment would become the trial’s epitaph: “The dagger of the assassin had been concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.
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On December 4th, 1947, the sentences came down. Four defendants received life imprisonment, including Schlegelberger and Rothaug. Five others received terms of seven to ten years. One got five.
Four were acquitted. Within ten years, every single one of them would be free. None of the men convicted in the Justice Case served anything close to their full sentences. Schlegelberger walked out of Landsberg prison in 1950 on health grounds.
He was 73 and had served less than three years of a life sentence. He returned to Flensburg, fought for and won a state secretary’s pension, published legal texts, and lived until 1970. He died at 94, a free man drawing a government salary from the country whose justice system he had helped run for Hitler. Oswald Rothaug served until December 1956.
Herbert Klemm, Thierack’s wartime state secretary, was released the following year. By the end of 1957, all four life sentences had been commuted. Kurt Rothenberger, sentenced to seven years, returned to legal work in Hamburg, and took his own life in 1959 when old investigations were reopened. These outcomes were not accidents.
On January 31st, 1951, US High Commissioner John J. McCloy issued a sweeping clemency decision covering the Landsberg prisoners. Ten of fifteen death sentences were commuted, most fixed terms reduced. Pressure had been building all through 1950: the Soviet atomic test, the outbreak of war in Korea, and the urgent need to court West Germany as a Western ally.
The bigger instrument was waiting in Bonn. On May 11th, 1951, the Bundestag passed a law that returned nearly every former civil servant, judges and prosecutors included, to government service with seniority and pensions intact. A 1948 Allied report had already found that 60 to 70 percent of judges and prosecutors in the US zone were former Nazi Party members. The new law protected them.
By the late 1950s, the West German judiciary looked much as it had under the Reich. Von Schlabrendorff watched it all from inside the profession he had nearly died defying. He had returned to legal practice in West Germany, published one of the first major memoirs of the July 20th plot, and given evidence in trials of senior Nazi figures. In 1967, West Germany gave him a seat on its highest court.
On September 1st, 1967, he was sworn into the Federal Constitutional Court’s Second Senate in Karlsruhe. He was 60 years old. His tenure would last eight years. That same summer, a Berlin court convicted Hans-Joachim Rehse, a former People’s Court judge who had signed 231 death sentences, of complicity in three murders.
He was sentenced to five years. No West German court had ever convicted a People’s Court judge before. None ever would again. In December 1968, a retrial ordered by the Federal Court of Justice acquitted Rehse.
The Appeals Court reasoned that a judge could be convicted for his verdicts only if he had knowingly broken the law, a doctrine known as judicial privilege. Rehse said he had believed his sentences were legal under the laws of the time. That was enough. All other investigations into People’s Court personnel were dropped.
On December 15th, 1970, the Second Senate ruled on a constitutional challenge to a new law expanding state powers of surveillance and wiretapping. The majority upheld it. Von Schlabrendorff disagreed. Alongside two other justices, he became the first judge in the history of the Federal Constitutional Court to put his formal disagreement on the record.
A man whose hands had been driven through with spikes by the Gestapo in 1944 was writing the court’s first official objection to expanding state surveillance. He retired on November 7th, 1975. The reckoning, such as it was, came after him. In February 1978, a playwright published an article in Die Zeit describing Hans Filbinger, the Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg and a senior federal politician, as a terrible jurist for his work as a military judge in 1945.
Four death sentences in which Filbinger had participated came to light. He resigned in August 1978, the most prominent West German politician forced from office over a Nazi-era judicial record. Von Schlabrendorff died on September 30th, 1980, in Wiesbaden. He was 73.
In January 1985, the Bundestag passed a resolution declaring the People’s Court an instrument of judicial murder and state terrorism. In May 1998, a federal law annulled every judgment that court had ever handed down, including the 1945 charges against von Schlabrendorff himself. The court that had tried to kill him had been struck from the German legal record by the country whose highest bench he had sat on.
