Thinking about the recent surge in anti-Semitism (brought to us by the Democrats, Antifa, the NAACP, and Harvard) called to mind my favorite historical instance of a rabid anti-Semite getting his well-earned comeuppance.

The story involves Roland Freisler, one of the most odious human beings of the 20^th century. Characterizing Freisler as a fanatic Nazi just won’t cut it. He was more the Platonic ideal of a diehard, foaming-at-the-mouth-in-the-bunker Nazi, the kind that all other Nazis strive to emulate, even amid the bitter knowledge that they will never match him for sheer vileness.

Freisler was a pure opportunist. While a POW in Russia during WW I, he eagerly attached himself to the Bolsheviks following the October 1917 coup. He served as a commissar on their behalf in his POW camp and was also involved with the paramilitary Red Guards.

After the war, Freisler returned to Germany as a full-fledged communist. Yet within a short time, he just as avidly connected with the Nazi party, joining up in 1925. He quickly worked his way into the Nazi hierarchy, culminating in his appointment as the chief of the Reich’s Ministry of Justice in 1934, where he oversaw the Nazification of the German justice system.

Freisler was a key figure at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, in which the planning for the Final Solution was carried out.

Later that year, he was appointed president of the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), essentially becoming Adolf Hitler’s hanging judge. Freisler had witnessed Soviet show trials while visiting the USSR during the 30s, and imported Stalinist methods to Nazi Germany for the same purpose. Although legal protocols were followed in form, the trials were circuses, with Freisler shouting insults and imprecations at the defendants while the defense counsel stood meekly silent before hearing the inevitable death sentence. One of Freisler’s tricks was to see that the prisoners in the dock were issued with oversized pants with no belts, allowing him to scream “Stop fiddling with your trousers!” Among his victims was the schoolgirl Sophie Scholl of the White Rose resistance movement.

On February 3, 1945, Freisler was presiding over the trial of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who as a Wehrmacht officer had been prominent in Ludwig Beck’s underground resistance group attempting to bring down Hitler, and who had helped carry out several failed assassination efforts. Schlabrendorff had been picked up in the vast manhunt following Col. Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s bold July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler. The end result was foreordained. But before sentence could be passed, Berlin was struck by an air raid by B-17s of the USAAF’s Eighth Air Force. As the sirens sounded, the courtroom emptied out, with everyone present heading for the air raid shelter. Freisler turned back to retrieve some paperwork (some wehraboos claim that he’d gone back to assist some female court clerks, but this is unlikely). At that moment, a bomb hit the roof of the courthouse, and a pillar collapsed atop Freisler, burying him in the wreckage of the courtroom he’d debased. Schlabrendorff was evidently looking over his shoulder at the very moment that Freisler was struck down. It’s not for nothing that it was Germans who coined the term “Schadenfreude.” (Some sources claim that Freisler was hit by bomb shrapnel and bled to death in front of the courthouse, but all agree that Schlabrendorff was present.)

German punctilio took control, and a mistrial was declared., a month later Schlabrendorff was acquitted on the grounds that his confession had been coerced by Gestapo torture (this would not have happened under Freisler). Hitler then personally issued a death warrant, but that German fixation on proper procedure kept Schlabrendorff alive straight through into early May, when he was liberated by Allied troops.

But that’s only half of it.

It happens that the Eighth AF formation that struck Berlin was commanded by Lt. Col. Robert Rosenthal, a lawyer, a highly decorated airman, and, needless to say, Jewish. It was a bomb from one of Rosenthal’s planes -- it’s even possible that the bomb that hit the courthouse was dropped from Rosenthal’s own plane – that killed Freisler. It’s a real pity that Freisler never knew that he had been struck down by a member of a race he believed to be Untermenschen.

But wait, as they say in the late-night commercials – there’s more.

Rosenthal’s B-17 was hit and seriously damaged by German flak. The main fuel tank was punctured, and at the rate they were losing fuel, it was clear that they’d never get back to England, or even an alternate field in France or Belgium. But Rosenthal knew that the Soviets were a little more than a hundred miles from Berlin at this point. So, as the rest of the formation headed for home, he kept boring on eastward.

At some point the plane caught fire. After assuring that the rest of the crew had escaped, Rosenthal finally bailed out when his bomber was less than a thousand feet above the ground. He was found by Red Army troops, who were delighted to hear that he had been carrying out a raid against Berlin. He was soon forwarded to Moscow, and was back in action in a matter of weeks.

Both Schlabrendorff and Rosenthal went on to distinguished careers in their field. Schlabrendorff became a judge on West Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, which had replaced the Nazi’s degraded “justice system.” Rosenthal served as an assistant prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials (where he questioned Hermann Goering) and in 2006 was inducted into the Jewish-American Hall of Fame.

There exist some ladies who would ask that this story be put into proper “context.” So here it is: any civilization demands certain obligations from its constituents. Among the most critical is that they recognize gross evil when they see it – evil of the kind embodied by Roland Freisler – that they take its measure, and that they work to strike it down. Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Robert Rosenthal both accomplished this, at serious risk to themselves. The elites of Harvard, MIT and UPenn need to be aware that we will do no less.

Images: Bundesarchiv, USAF