One of the more absurd episodes in the twelve-year history in the Third Reich was Hans Franks's 1942 university lecture tour. Frank, the brutal and thoroughly venal head of the General Government in Poland, launched the tour in response to the SS's investigation and arrest of Karl Lasch, the governor of Eastern Galicia and one of Frank's procurers for booty. After Lasch's death in police custody, Frank launched his tour claiming in his speech on 9 June 1942 in Berlin that :

A nation does not allow itself to be governed by force, the life of a nation is unthinkable without law. Force is only a technical factor, which can never replace the law. So the German nation lives freely by the virtue of its law and can never be compelled to become a Volksgemeinschaft by force.

Frank continued his attack on the SS's assumption of arbitrary authority in Vienna, Munich, and Heidelberg and warning that if events were to continue evolving as they were, Germany would become "a police state."

Frank's speech was hypocritical and self-serving; Lasch was his brother-in-law and deeply involved in maintaining Frank's quasi-royal lifestyle in the General Government. But the speech was also a microcosm of two separate developments within Germany. Firstly, it demonstrated the polycratic nature of the Third Reich in which multiple agencies and bureaus competed with each other for power and there was little organization. Frank and the SS had butted heads throughout 1941 and 1942 over the issue of German colonization and settlement in the East. As the SS ascended up the ladder of state hierarchy, it drew the ire of other institutions and individuals who saw their power diminish accordingly. Frank launched his attack on the SS, albeit never openly in his speeches, with the full knowledge that there were other groups who begrudged the growing power of Himmler like the military and the remaining German judiciary.

Second, Frank packaged his defense of legal norms and German traditions as being fully congruent with the ideal of the New Order and National Socialism. His lectures never questioned the role of Hitler or Führerprinzip, and even his lecture's assault on the SS only attacked the organization's growth, not the organization itself. This was of a piece with other justifications for the Third Reich's dictatorship in the 1930s and early 1940s which portrayed the NSDAP and Hitler as both the guarantors of Germans' traditional rights and the forces that allowed them to reach their full potential. In National Socialist legal discourse, the power of law and its protections such as due process were rights innate to all Germans who were free from either racial or ideological taints. Although Hitler had little respect for legal norms and traditions, there were some within the Third Reich's hierarchy who did, and they sought to cast existing German law with National Socialist precepts. The legal bureaucracy under the Third Reich increasingly adapted a social policing function that used the law to punish transgressors against the Volksgemeinschaft and turned a blind eye to the flagrant violations of law committed by the state and the SS.

But the commitment to due process and the sanctity of law, albeit racialized justice, remained salient both in German courts and in wider German society up through the first half of the war. A number of Germans would protest state encroachments on their daily lives as a violation of their rights as members of the Volksgemeinschaft and the state never fully did away with existing laws. One of the minor rocks the T4 euthanasia program ran aground on was when Ludwig Schlaich, the Protestant director of a Stetten asylum, questioned the legality and ethics of the program in a series of protests to state authorities, he contacted the families of his charges to have them pick up their relatives before they were murdered. Although few of the inmates' took up Schlaich's offer, this notification was within his legal rights as was his interference with the T4 program. Although most asylum directors complied with the euthanasia program, the T4's innately illegal nature allowed those few brave exceptions like Schlaich to run interference. Schlaich himself even initially framed his protests to higher authorities as trying to call Hitler's attention to an illegal abuse of power done in his name, stating in a 1940 letter to Goebbels that "if I weren't convinced that the Führer knows nothing about this, my trust in him would vanish."

Whether or not Schlaich was serious in his faith in Hitler or this was just window-dressing for his Goebbels petition is indeterminate, but in either case, it shows the extent to which some Germans sought to reconcile the ideals of the National Socialist Führerstaat with existing legal norms. Such hopes were of course futile as the war accelerated the tendencies of the German state to embrace an arbitrary and highly punitive form of justice. The appointment of Otto-Georg Thierack as Minister of Justice in 1942 was a signal to those champions of due process that such niceties had little place in the new legal turn. Although the Third Reich was never able to fully erase legal norms and protections for Aryans, the justice system became much more willing to enable legal terror than it was during the thirties and early war period. For example, German courts had meted out 250 capital sentences in 1939, but by 1942 legal death sentences approached 4500. Not only were ordinary Germans increasingly at risk from the state power, but so were its jurists. In April 1942, an extraordinary session of the Reichstag granted Hitler the sole power to dismiss judges at will, and he later responded to Frank's lectures with a terse warning that "our legal gentlemen" should keep out of the ongoing process of Eastern reorganization and settlement.

So in this context, Conspiracy's version of Stuckart is dramatizing a valid concern a number of state bureaucrats had in 1942. Not only were there palpable fears that the ascendancy of the SS meant an erosion of German law (albeit only for Aryans), but that in sanctioning this erosion, they were losing power to a rival. One of the strengths of the film is that it manages to convey this matrix of competing agencies and mutual hostilities that was endemic within the Third Reich. At times, such concerns could create speed bumps for the state, but they were not much of an impediment to a growing legal arbitrariness that sanctioned an increase in state violence and terror.

Postscript: Frank, of course, lost his battle to prevent a police state (and he fought this battle about nine years too late) and Hitler stripped him of his NSDAP titles, but not his position as head of the General Government. This demonstrates not only the power of Hitler to decide squabbles within the polycratic system, but also how it was quite durable. Even the "losers" in these internecine fights retained some of their own turf as Hitler was seldom willing to divest them of power completely. As for Frank, in a pattern of delusions, he provided his voluminous diaries to prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials thinking it would exonerate him, as would his lecture tours, claiming:

The speeches can be read. It was the last effort that I made to bring home to Hitler, by means of the tremendous response of the German people, the truth that the rule of law was immortal. I stated at that time that a Reich without law and without humanity could not last long, and more in that vein. After I had been under police surveillance for several days in Munich, I was relieved of all my Party offices. As this was a matter of German domestic politics under the sovereignty of the German Reich, I refrain from making any more statements about it here.

As in 1942, Frank's testimony married a self-serving sanctification of the rule of law with incredible stupidity and moral myopia. His son Niklas Frank said of his father in light of both his crimes and inability to come to terms with them, often claims his one regret is that his father's neck did not snap harder at his hanging.

Sources

Housden, Martyn. Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War. New York, United States: Basic Books, 2015.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.