At a lunchtime meeting held on August 20,1942, to mark the occasion of the appointment of Otto-Georg Thierack as Reich justice minister and Roland Freisler as president of the “People's Court,” Hitler launched into one of his characteristic monologues. The judicial system, he said, was soft. Criminals were being allowed to get away with far too much on the home front. Looting and petty crime were being punished with mere prison sentences instead of death. The results of this in the longer term would be disastrous:

In order to reestablish the balance, Hitler declared, the “negative” elements in the German population had to be killed in much larger numbers. In the following months, Thierack and his officials redefined the role of penal policy to achieve this end. Punishment, the new Reich minister of justice told German judges on June 1, 1943, “in our time has to carry out the popular-hygienic task of continually cleansing the body of the race by the ruthless elimination of criminals unworthy of life.”