The story of Friedrich Weißler: Bravery, cowardice, murder

Who was Friedrich Weißler? He was born of German Jewish stock on 28 April 1891, in Königshütte in what was then Upper Silesia, now part of Poland.

While an infant his parents embraced the Protestant faith and so Weißler was baptised as a Protestant. By the outbreak of World War I, Weißler had completed his law studies and gained a doctorate in law. During that war, he served as a lieutenant in the German army. Upon its close, he returned to the field of law, passing the equivalent of the bar exam in 1920 and being appointed an assistant judge in Halle in 1922. That same year he was married to Hanna Schäfer and the couple had two sons. In 1932 Weißler became director of the regional court in the central German city of Magdeburg.

Within a year, though, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had taken power and begun to systematically reshape German society and culture, and to implement their racial policies. Given his ethnic background, it is not surprising that Weißler was branded a non-Aryan in 1933 and experienced bullying and harassment from the Sturmabteilung – literally the ‘Storm Detachment’ and usually known simply as the SA – which was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing before the SS.