Hall Putsch trial, Hitler was allowed to interrupt the proceedings as often as he wished, to cross-examine witnesses at will, and to speak on his own behalf at almost any length. Gürtner obtained Hitler's early release from Landsberg Prison, and later persuaded the Bavarian government to legalize the banned NSDAP, and allow Hitler to speak again in public. Minister of Justice On 2 June 1932, Gürtner was nominated as Reich Minister of Justice under Chancellor Franz von Papen. After serving in the cabinets of Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, Gürtner was retained by Hitler in his post, and made responsible for coordinating jurisprudence in Nazi Germany. Although Gürtner was not a Nazi, he shared the increasingly authoritarian bent of most of his DNVP colleagues. He fully supported the Reichstag Fire Decree, which effectively wiped out civil liberties in Germany. Indeed, on the day before the Reichstag fire, he proposed a bill that was almost as heavy-handed as the Reichstag Fire Decree; it would have instituted severe restrictions on civil liberties under the pretense of keeping the Communists from launching a general strike. He also merged the German judges' association with the new National Socialist Lawyers Association (Nationalsozialistischer Rechtswahrerbund), and provided a veil of constitutional legality for the Nazi State. At the end of June 1933, the DNVP was dissolved under pressure from the Nazis, and the DNVP Chairman Alfred Hugenberg resigned from the cabinet. However Gürtner, instead of resigning, elected to remain in the government as an independent. At first, Gürtner also tried to protect the independence of the judiciary and at least a facade of legal norms. He sought to curb the SA and SS' growing tendency to engage in extrajudicial punishments. Although no democrat, Gürtner believed in the rechtsstaat ("law state"), and sought to protect the turf of his ministry. He was most insistent that only the courts could inflict punishments on opponents of the Nazi regime. The ill-treatment of prisoners at concentration camps in Wuppertal (Kemna), Bredow and Hohnstein (in Saxony), under the jurisdiction of local SA leaders, provoked a sharp protest from the Ministry of Justice. Gürtner observed that prisoners were being beaten to the point of unconsciousness with whips and blunt instruments, commenting that such treatment reveals a brutality and cruelty in the perpetrators which are totally alien to German sentiment and feeling. Such cruelty, reminiscent of oriental sadism cannot be explained or excused by