Marion Freisler

Marion Freisler (10 February 1910 in Hamburg – 21 January 1997 in Munich), née Russegger was the wife of Roland Freisler, the infamous judge and chairman of the Nazi Volksgerichtshof (People's Court), who died in 1945 during an air raid in Berlin. She is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Anna Freisler.

Marion Russegger was born 10 February 1910 in Hamburg, the daughter of Bernhard Adolf Cajetan Russegger, a merchant in Hamburg and Bremen, and Cornelia Pirscher. On 24 March 1928, she married Roland Freisler, who was a lawyer and city councillor of the Nazi Party in Kassel at the time. They had two sons, Harald and Roland, and both were baptized. On 3 February 1945, her husband was killed during an Allied air raid in Berlin. In his will, dated 1 October 1944, Freisler had decreed that the two houses belonged to his wife.

After the war, Marion Freisler resumed her birth name Russegger and moved to Munich.

In 1985, there was a scandal about Russegger. In 1974, her pension was raised by about 400 Deutsche Mark. The explanation given by the pension office was that had her husband survived the war, and not been executed, disbarred, or imprisoned by the military tribunals of the allied countries, he presumably would have had a successful career as a lawyer or a senior judge. This decision was protested by a member of the Bavarian Landtag, but the move was rejected by the state government and there were no consequences for Marion Freisler. This was one of the last incidents connected with the problematic issue of social integration of National Socialist jurists in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early years.

In 1997, Marion Freisler was buried in Berlin, in the Russegger family plot, alongside her parents and her husband (Roland Freisler's name is not on his gravestone).

Bibliography

• Guido Knopp, Hitler's Hitmen, Sutton Publishing (2002), chapter "The Hanging Judge", pp. 213–251.