Gurtner, Franz

Born August 26, 1881 in Regensburg in the family of a railway engineer. He studied law at the University of Munich . He participated in the First World War , first fought in France, then served in Palestine, and was awarded the Iron Cross of the I and II degrees. After the war he led legal practice. In 1919 he joined the German National People’s Party . As Minister of Justice of Bavaria in 1922-32, he defended Hitler , who seemed to him a consistent nationalist. Gürtner joined the Nazi Party only in 1937, but he always sympathized with the Nazi movement. It was he who achieved a comparatively lenient punishment for Hitler after the failure of the Beer Putsch of 1923, promoted him to release from Landsberg prison and persuaded the government of Bavaria to legalize the Nazi party and allow Hitler to speak publicly.

In June 1932, Gürtner was appointed to the post of Minister of Justice in the government of von Papen , and the following year he occupied the same post in Hitler’s first government. After the bloody events of the " Night of the Long Knives " on the initiative of Gürtner, a decree was announced declaring Hitler's actions "fair, aimed at protecting the state." It is responsible for dismantling the old legal system, for ensuring the policy of glaaihshaltung and the creation of Nazi courts. At the very beginning of the Second World War, Gürtner established special military field courts (Standgerichte), who committed the massacre of Jews and Poles in the occupied territory of Poland . Gürtner died suddenly in Berlin on January 29, 1941, after which there were suggestions that, as an old-school lawyer, he did not fully agree with everything he ordered, and there was a version that his death was violent.

• S. Voropaev. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, 1996