People's Court (Germany)

The People's Court, in German the Volksgerichtshof, was a tribunal set up in Nazi Germany on 24 April 1934 to try political crimes such as treason. It was created after the acquittals in the Reichstag fire trial and was meant to impose severe penalties on the regime's opponents while keeping a show of legality. At first it kept some legal procedure, but it soon dropped any pretence of judicial independence, rejecting due process, the right of appeal and the right to counsel, and it punished a so-called criminal mentality rather than offences defined in law. Under Roland Freisler the execution rate rose sharply, and between 1937 and 1945 it heard more than 14,000 cases and condemned over 5,000 people to death, including resistance members and the plotters of 20 July 1944. It dissolved in April 1945. In 1985 the West German Bundestag called it an instrument of state-sanctioned terror, and in 1998 all of its judgments were annulled by federal law.