Wilhelm Frick takes office in Thuringia
On 23 January 1930 Wilhelm Frick became Thuringia's minister of the interior and of public education — the first National Socialist anywhere in Germany to hold a government office. He lasted fourteen months.
Three years before Hitler became chancellor his party already held a ministry, in the state whose capital was Weimar, and everyone could watch what it did with it.
23 January 1930
Wilhelm Frick was appointed minister of the interior and of public education in Thuringia. The exhibition on the history of Germany's interior ministries records him without embellishment as the first National Socialist to take over a government office — not a seat, not a mandate, but an office with a budget and a staff.[1]
The police and the schools
The two portfolios were not an accident of coalition arithmetic. Interior meant the police; public education meant the schools, the universities and the cultural institutions. In the state that had housed the Bauhaus until 1925 and the party congress in 1926, that combination amounted to a laboratory — what a National Socialist administration does with the instruments of a state, tried at small scale and in the open.
Fourteen months
The Thuringian Landtag carried a motion of no confidence and Frick resigned on 1 April 1931.[2] The experiment was therefore both short and, from the party's point of view, instructive. He returned to office in 1933 as Reich minister of the interior, with the same two instincts and no Landtag able to vote him out.
Sources
- NSDAP-Politiker Frick wird thüringischer Innenminister — Geschichte der deutschen Innenministerien, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Wilhelm Frick — Deutsches Historisches Museum (LeMO), retrieved 29 August 2026
Period
1918–1933
A National Socialist held a ministry in the Republic's own namesake state three years before 1933.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
On 3 and 4 July 1926 the party held its first congress after being refounded, with Hitler present, in the hall where the Republic had voted its constitution seven years earlier.
The same state, four years after the party had staged its congress in the Nationaltheater: first the hall, then the ministry.
Five years after the Bauhaus left, what it had painted on the walls of its workshop building was destroyed — by the school that took its place.
The education portfolio had been in NSDAP hands since Frick took office that January.