Karl Roland Freisler (Celle, Germany; October 30, 1893Berlin, February 3, 1945) was a lawyer, military officer, Nazi politician and president of the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) of Nazi Germany. He was one of the most feared and implacable judges of Nazism; he staged judicial farces characterized by his rude and humiliating way of addressing the defendants and the prohibition of wearing belts (so that his pants would fall down ridiculing them in front of the audience) causing even the same Nazis of Hitler's entourage to reject him.

Unlike most highranking Nazis, there are not many details beyond the basics of Freisler's early years. He was born in 1893, the son of Julius Freisler, an engineer and professor, and Charlotte Auguste Florentine Schwerdtfeger; Roland had a little brother, Oswald Freisler.

He was a combatant during the First World War in which he achieved the rank of lieutenant in 1915. He was captured by the Russians and sent to the rear as a prisoner of war where he learned Russian; the Bolsheviks used it to take shipments of food to the countryside. It is said that after passing through Russia, at the height of the Soviet revolution, Freisler became interested in Marxism and returned to the Weimar Republic as a fervent communist. However, there are no documents or evidence to support these claims. Historian H.W. Koch said that "Freisler was never a communist, although early in his career he did belong to the left wing of the NSDAP." Freisler always denied accusations that he was a former communist sympathizer, the great enemy of Nazism, but he was never able to completely escape the stigma of having been a bolshe.

He studied jurisprudence at the University of Jena, worked in Kassel as a lawyer and as a city councilor in the VölkischSozialer Block, an extremely nationalist group. In 1928 he married Marion Russegger and had two children.