The People's Court ( acronymed to VGH) was a tribunal established in Nazi Germany in 1934 to try political crimes such as treason. It became one of the Nazi's most notorious instruments of state terror, and is associated with summary justice, execution, and denial of civil and legal rights.

The court was created on 24 April 1934, in response to acquittals in the Reichstag fire trial, and building on precedents such as the Bavarian People's Court. Based on factors such as the stab-in-the-back myth, the Enabling Act, and the Führerprinzip, the court aimed to impose severe penalties on the Nazis’ enemies under a façade of legality.

Initially the court maintained some semblance of legal procedure but progressively abandoned all pretense of independence. During the 1936–1942 presidency of Otto Georg Thierack the court expanded its jurisdiction and openly declared itself a political weapon. With the start of World War II, prosecutions grew exponentially, and as the war turned against Germany sentences grew harsher, with the execution rate jumping from 5% to 46% under Judge-President Roland Freisler. After Freisler's death in an air raid, the court continued under Harry Haffner before dissolving in April 1945.

The People's Court rejected liberal legal principles, including judicial independence, due process, the right to appeal, and the right to counsel. It also operated on the principle of punishing "criminal mentality" rather than crimes defined in law and used a broad interpretation of “preparation for treason” to impose the death penalty for acts such as telling anti-Nazi jokes and listening to foreign radio stations.

Between 1937 and 1945, the court heard over 14,000 cases and condemned over 5,000 people to death. Victims included resistance members, communists, and those considered disloyal to the Nazi regime. The 1944 show trials of the participants in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler are infamous for Freisler’s attempts to berate and humiliate the defendants.

After the war, most People's Court judges escaped justice, and at least 29 People's Court judges and 69 prosecutors went on to work in the West German court system. However, in 1985, the West German Bundestag declared that the People's Court was an instrument of judicial murder and state terrorism, stating "The Volksgerichtshof was an instrument of state-sanctioned terror, which served one single purpose, which was the destruction of political opponents. Behind a juridical facade, state-sanctioned murder was committed", and in 1998 all judgments of the People’s Court were annulled by German Federal Law.

History

Background

H.W. Koch states that three main features of Germany's history led to the creation of the People's Court: The Stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had lost World War I primarily because of treason and revolution on the home-front. The Enabling Act which empowered the government to deviate from the constitution without any legislative constraints. The Führerprinzip, the belief that Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler, was both above the law and deserving of unquestioning loyalty.

In addition, whilst Hitler disliked laws and lawyers as a constraint on his freedom of action, he was also concerned to keep up a facade of legality to his actions, a process now known as autocratic legalism. He openly stated that, "we take recourse to democratic means only to win power," and that "what forces us to use such means is the constitution".

Previous special courts

Political courts existed in Germany before the Nazi era, and Robert D. Rachlin argues that the excesses of the People's Court can be viewed in the context of historical antecedents such as the medieval Feme Courts and the reactionary, anti-democratic and anti-semitic Weimar Republic judiciary that treated right-wing and anti-Jewish crimes more leniently than they treated similar crimes which were committed by members and supporters of the political left. Previous (special court) and (people's court) had generally been set up temporarily in response to civil disturbances. For example, the People's Courts of Bavaria were established during the German Revolution in November 1918 and handed out more than 31,000 sentences before being abolished in May 1924. One of the Bavarian People's Court's most notable trials was that of the Beer Hall Putsch conspirators.

Nazi expansion of treason laws

Under the Weimar Constitution, Articles 80–92 of the 1871 Reichsstrafgesetzbuch (Imperial Penal Code), defined high treason as attacks on the head of state, attempts to alter the territory of the federal state, or violations of the constitution. The Nazis, regarded this definition as excessively liberal and too narrow. The day after the Reichstag fire of 27 January 1933, they enacted two decrees expanding the law on treason: the ‘Decree of the President against Treason and High Treasonous Activities’, which extended the definition of treason to include "acts of political subversion”, and the ‘Decree of the President for the Protection of People and State’, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, which made all acts of treason capital offences.

A month later, in a 23 March 1933 speech to the Reichstag regarding the Enabling Act, Hitler prefigured the creation of the People's Court with his statement that, "Not the individual, but the Volk must be the focus of legal concern... In the future, state and national treason will be annihilated with barbaric ruthlessness".

Establishment

The People's Court was established on 24 April 1934 by decree of Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The proximate cause of its creation was the outcome of the Reichstag fire trial in front of the Reich Court of Justice (Reichsgericht) in which all but one of the defendants were acquitted. However, Hitler had pronounced the necessity for a "national tribunal" to execute "tens of thousands" of people he regarded as traitors in Mein Kampf.

The ‘Law Amending Provisions of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure’ which created the People’s Court also transferred jurisdiction over crimes that had previously been within the jurisdiction of the Reich Court of Justice: treason, high treason, major cases of sabotage, and assassination of members of the government. The definition of treason used by the court was initially unchanged, but the penalties were made substantially more severe. The same law defined the composition of the court, the appointment of its members, and many of its procedures.

Criticism of the creation of the People's Court was countered by statements that it was a temporary expedient and would either be replaced or transformed as part of future reforms of the legal system. Official commentary saw the court only as a way to make law enforcement more efficient.

The first president of the court was a former judge of the Berlin Special Court, Fritz Rehn. However Rehn died two months after taking office. For the next two years the post of president remained vacant.

Early days of the court

The People's Court was created outside the framework of the German constitution, although whether the Weimar-era constitution was even still in force was a matter of unresolved controversy within the Nazi Party. Regardless, in reality the führerprinzip rejected all liberal legal principles in favour of Nazi control. with an editorial in the Völkischer Beobachter commenting that the People's Court was an '...expression of National Socialist basic concepts in the field of the application of the law."

Despite this rejection of the rule of law, there was continuity of personnel within the judicial system, with only a few judges retiring or being removed., and initially, the legal procedures of the People's Court did not differ from previous treason trials. Early decisions of the court were cautious to the point that they were criticised by the Nazi regime, with only four death sentences handed down in 1934 and nine in 1935. Between April 1935 and August 1936, the Ministry of Justice criticized eighteen of the court’s verdicts as excessively lenient. Hitler later stated that the People’s Court, "had not initially corresponded to his desired tough standards."

The Secretary of State of the Ministry of Justice, Roland Freisler, who was the driving force of the rise of the People's Court, intended to make it Germany's supreme court, superseding the Reichsgericht, with the goal of making the führerprinzip the basis of the entire judicial system. He believed that the People's Court had three advantages: speed, efficiency, and that there was no appeal against its verdicts. For the Nazis, who could eliminate opponents by taking them into so-called protective custody in a concentration camp, the advantage of the People’s Court was it eliminated their enemies behind a facade of legality. This led to conflict between the Nazi appointees to the court, who understood that the court was a charade, and the conservative “judges of the old school”, who expected the law, however draconian, to be upheld in genuine trials.

Thierack Presidency

Contrary to the pronouncement that the People's Court was a temporary expedient, a decree of 18 April 1936 transformed it into a "full court according to the Constitution of Courts Act". Shortly afterwards, on 1 May 1936, Otto Georg Thierack, formerly vice-president of the Reich Court of Justice, became president of the court.

Expansion of jurisdiction and reduced legalism

With the accession of Thierack, the court gained prestige, symbolised by its judges being given the right to wear the red robes of the supreme court. It also increased its jurisdiction to include misprision of treason, economic sabotage, Wehrkraftzersetzung (corroding defensive strength), evading military service, sedition, and espionage.

The regime had initially denied characterisation of the court as a summary or revolutionary court, claiming it was independent. However, by 1937 such pretence was dropped, with minister of justice, Franz Gürtner declaring the court to be, "a task force for combating and defeating all attacks on the external and internal security of the Reich.", the vice-president of the court stating that its members, were "politicians first and judges second", and its chief prosecutor announcing that the purpose of the court was, "to annihilate the enemies of National Socialism".

The beginning of World War II brought an increased number of prosecutions (doubling from 1939 to 1940), an increase of the severity of sentencing, and an expansion of the court's jurisdiction to cover undermining morale. Suggestions such as the war being either pointless or lost, or that peace should be sought, and statements attacking Hitler in any way, were ranked as capital crimes. This was true even of private remarks, with the court declaring that "every political remark must be regarded as a public statement in principle", a position without support in law.

Sources vary on how often cases of undermining morale resulted in a death sentence. Müller states that "such remarks were always punishable by death", while Koch states that "reliable statistics are difficult to compile", and Johnson shows that the law was selectively enforced, with only around a third of accusations against "ordinary Germans" in Krefeld reaching court at all, while two-thirds of accusations against non-Jews in Cologne were dismissed by the local Special Court, and only three percent were referred to the People's Court.

Freisler Presidency

In August 1942, Thierack was appointed as Reich Minister of Justice and Roland Freisler was appointed as President of the People's Court. Freisler had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1923.

Further deterioration of legalism