Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilhelm Frick

It is hard to read Frick here without hearing the bureaucrat’s favorite lullaby: I was only doing my job. The line is engineered as self-exoneration dressed up as principle, a move that tries to turn accountability into persecution. “Legal and moral duty” is the key pairing: legality is invoked to imply legitimacy, morality to suggest inner virtue. He stacks them to create a sealed alibi, as if following the state’s rules automatically cleanses the state’s crimes.

The subtext is a bid to normalize mass wrongdoing by recasting it as routine administration. “Tens of thousands of dutiful German officials” is not an incidental detail; it’s a tactical crowd. If so many people were involved, the argument goes, then punishment becomes irrational, even vindictive. Quantity substitutes for innocence, and “dutiful” becomes a moral deodorant sprayed over participation in a regime built on coercion and extermination.

Context makes the rhetoric chillingly transparent. Frick wasn’t a minor paper-pusher caught in history’s undertow; he was a senior Nazi official and Reich Minister of the Interior, central to the legal scaffolding that enabled repression and racial policy. His defense leans on the same modern myth that bureaucracies rely on to survive scandal: that responsibility dissolves when it’s distributed through procedures.

The intent, then, is not merely personal. It’s a last-ditch attempt to salvage the moral authority of the administrative state by insisting that obedience is virtue, even when the law itself has been weaponized.