August Franz Anton Hans Fritzsche (21 April 1900 – 27 September 1953)[1] was the Ministerialdirektor at the Propagandaministerium (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) of Nazi Germany.

[2] In September 1932, he began his broadcasting career as head of the Drahtloser Dienst (the Wireless News service, a government agency), and started his first broadcast, a daily program called "Hans Fritzsche speaks" (Es spricht Hans Fritzsche).

[4] Following the Nazi seizure of power, the Wireless News service with Fritzsche as its head, was incorporated into Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry on 1 May 1933.

He went to his nearby office on Wilhelmplatz and wrote a surrender letter addressed to Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov.

Burgdorf then pulled his pistol to shoot Fritzsche, but a radio technician knocked the gun and the bullet fired hit the ceiling.

He was confined to a "standing coffin", a 3-square-foot (0.28 m2) cell where it was impossible to sleep, and placed on a bread and hot water diet.

In his positions in the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State, Fritzsche played a role to further the conspiracy to commit atrocities and to launch the war of aggression.

Shirer remarked that "no-one in the courtroom, including Fritzsche, seemed to know why he was there – he was too small a fry – unless it were as a ghost for Goebbels".

[16] Nuremberg prosecutor Alexander Hardy later said that evidence not available to the prosecution at the time proved Fritzsche not only knew of the extermination of European Jews but also "played an important part in bringing [Nazi crimes] about," and would have resulted in his conviction and execution.

Fritzsche, along with Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach, were eventually communed by Lutheran Pastor Henry F. Gerecke and were administered the Eucharist.

[20] According to British intelligence, Fritzsche was part of the Naumann Circle in the early 1950s, a group of ex-Nazis who aimed to infiltrate the Free Democratic Party and eventually restore the Nazi state.