Wilhelm Stuckart
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Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (1902 – 1953) was a Nazi Party lawyer and official and member of the Interior Ministry.
Stuckart joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1922. He was heavily involved in the early Nazi approach towards Jews, co-writing the anti-Jewish "Nuremberg Laws" imposed by the Nazi-controlled Reichstag in 1935.
Stuckart later represented Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister, at the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, which discussed the imposition of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the German Sphere of Influence in Europe".
It has been speculated by looking carefully at the edited conference minutes that at this conference Stuckart objected to the aformentioned laws being ignored by the SS in fulfilling the "Final Solution", and pointed out the bureaucratic problems of such a radical course of action — insisting that mandatory sterilization would be a better option in preserving the 'spirit' of the Nuremberg laws. However, the Conference Chairman, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, informed Stuckart that the decision to exterminate the Jews had been made by Adolf Hitler and that according to the Führerprinzip, Hitler's word was above all written law. It is worth noting also that Stuckart and several others at the conference realized that Hitler did not give this order in writing.
Stuckhart served briefly as Interior Minister after the fall of Heinrich Himmler in 1945.
After the war, Stuckart was arrested by the allies for war crimes and spent four years behind bars until being released for lack of evidence in 1949. He was killed in December 1953 near Hannover, West Germany in a car accident, though there has been speculation that the accident was set up by persons hunting down Nazi war criminals still at liberty.de:Wilhelm Stuckart nl:Wilhelm Stuckart