September 1938, Czechoslovakia. Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany, threatens to unleash
a European war unless the Sudetenland, a border area of Czechoslovakia on which the ethnic German
population lives, is ceded to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany
hold a conference in Munich between the 29th and 30th of September 1938 and agree to the German
annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. The Czechoslovaks
are not even invited to this conference and less than 6 months later on the 15th of March 1939,
in violation of the Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany invades and occupies the Czech provinces
of Bohemia and Moravia. Adolf Hitler himself arrives in Prague and on the 16th of March 1939,
by a proclamation from Prague Castle, establishes the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
One of the most powerful German Nazi officials in this protectorate becomes Karl Hermann Frank
Karl Hermann Frank was born on the 24th of January 1898 in Carlsbad, then part of Austria-Hungary.
His father Heinrich was elementary school teacher and ardent German nationalist who brought up his
son steeped in the German nationalist movement. When Karl was 9 or 10, he was hit right in the
eye by a rock while playing with other children. Even though the doctors tried to fix his eye for
a long time, they eventually had to take it out in 1918 and replaced it with a glass one.
Frank was 16 years old when the First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. He attempted
to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army but was rejected due to the blindness in his right eye.
In October 1918 the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed the independence
of Czechoslovakia. 50 percent of the Czechoslovak population consisted of
Czechs. Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and 16 percent respectively. Karl Hermann
Frank was a Sudeten German which was a name for ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia.
In the new country of Czechoslovakia, Frank became an extreme advocate of the
incorporation of the Sudetenland, where he lived, into Germany.
Frank became an active member of the protofascist party of Germans in Czechoslovakia named
the German National Socialist Workers' Party, which he joined in 1919. 6 years
later in 1925, Frank opened a bookstore which specialized in National-Socialist literature.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power. One of the reasons was that many Germans
could not concede their country’s defeat in World War I, arguing that “backstabbing” and weakness in
the rear had paralyzed and, eventually, caused the front to collapse. The Jews, they claimed,
had done much to spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army. They interpreted
the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the steep compensation payments that it entailed as
revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice. From 1933, the Nazi Regime began not only to
restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews - establishing the first concentration camps,
but it also demanded the “return” of the Sudetenland, to the German Reich.
The same year, the First Czechoslovak Republic had outlawed the German National
Socialist Workers' Party and on the 1st of October 1933, Konrad Henlein,
a leading Sudeten German politician in Czechoslovakia, created the Sudeten-German
Homeland Front which Karl Hermann Frank joined the same year and he also helped to organize it.
In April 1935, following a mandatory demand of the Czechoslovak government,
the party was renamed the Sudeten German Party or SdP.
In the parliamentary elections on the 19th of May 1935, the SdP, with 15.2% of the votes,
became the strongest of all the parties in Czechoslovakia. Frank was elected a member
of the Czechoslovak Parliament and when the same year he also became the deputy leader of the SdP,
the party gradually became more radical. Meanwhile, the influence exerted by the German
Nazi dictatorship became stronger and several groups within the party were financed by Germany.
The SdP became a major pro-Nazi force in Czechoslovakia with the explicit official
aim of breaking the country up and joining it with the Nazi Germany.
The SdP officially coordinated this policy with Nazi leaders in order to
integrate the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich.
In 1938, the party had over 1.3 million members which accounted for 40.6% of ethnic-German
citizens of Czechoslovakia and became one of the largest fascist parties in Europe at the time.
The situation culminated on the 24th of April 1938 when at a convention in Carlsbad,
Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party, presented to the Czechoslovak
government his demands including complete equality between the Sudeten Germans and the Czech people;
the legal recognition of the Sudeten Germans; self-government; and the freedom to decide for
an annexation to Nazi Germany. The Czechoslovak government responded by rejecting the demands
but stated that it was willing to provide more minority rights to the German minority.
When over three days between the 11th and 13th of March 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed Federal
State of Austria into the German Reich, the failure of the British and the French to take
action against him for violating the Versailles Treaty emboldened him toward further aggression.
In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded
to Germany. This part of Czechoslovakia also contained the Czechoslovak Army's defensive
positions in event of a war with Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy,
and Germany held a conference in Munich between the 29th and 30th of September 1938. In what
became known as the Munich Agreement, they agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in
exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. The Czechoslovaks were not invited to the conference
and felt they had been betrayed by the British and French governments. However, many Sudeten Germans
welcomed the German annexation of the Sudetenland and Karl Hermann Frank was one of them.
While Konrad Henlein was appointed Gauleiter,
meaning a regional leader of the Nazi Party of the Sudetenland,
Frank was made his deputy. On the 1st of November 1938 he joined the Nazi party and the SS.
On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi
Germany invaded and occupied the remaining parts of Czechoslovakia establishing the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia which by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
Immediately after the Nazis started to occupy the whole country,
they passed new anti-Jewish laws which were designed to exclude more than 118
000 Jews, that were living in the protectorate, from society and restrict their livelihood.
Their bank accounts were frozen, and they were forbidden to sell companies and real
estate which were confiscated and taken over by the Germans. In all, the Germans seized about a
half-billion dollars’ worth of Jewish property in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
After the occupation of the Czech lands, Frank was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer which was a
rank equivalent to General lieutenant and appointed Secretary of State of the Reich
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath.
At the end of April 1939, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS,
also named Frank the protectorate's Higher SS and Police Leader. As a result,
Frank wielded great power in the protectorate as he controlled the Nazi police apparatus,
including the intelligence service - the SD and the Security Police,
which consisted of Gestapo and the Kripo, which was a Criminal Police.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
While during the first months of the Protectorate, the Czech public turned to passive resistance,
the increasing displays of national sentiments eventually drew the ire
of Nazi officials who soon prohibited singing patriotic songs in public space.
But regardless of official bans, new acts of resistance occurred. One of them took place at
the first anniversary of the Munich Agreement on the 30th of September 1939 when a boycott of all
public transportation in Prague was organized. A mass demonstration was to be held on the
Czechoslovak Independence Day – the 28th of October. On that
day Czech students took to the streets to demonstrate against the Nazi occupation.
As the demonstration grew in size, protesters became bolder and started
to express their patriotic feelings openly, singing the national anthem – in both Czech
and Slovak – shouting anti-German slogans and demanding the return of the free Republic. Some
groups of students also vandalized German storefronts. The Nazis responded violently.
German civilian police started to fire on the crowd at random. As a result,
15 people were wounded and two, including Jan Opletal, a popular medical student, died.
Opetal’s funeral on the 15th of November gathered around 3,000 students. While at the beginning,
the procession, closely monitored by the security police, was peaceful, the situation grew tense as
some smaller groups of students started to sing the hymn and patriotic songs and chant
provocative slogans. In addition, the driver of the car of Karl Herman Frank was beaten
up. The incident angered Frank who insisted on treating Czechs with firmer hand. And he did.
The Nazi response was brutal. On the night of the 16th of November 1939, on the order of Konstantin
von Neurath and Karl Frank, the Gestapo raided student dormitories in Prague and Brno arresting
hundreds of students and taking many others from their homes. It is estimated that over 1,200
students were deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where 35 of them died.
At dawn the next day, the Germans shot nine alleged leaders of the demonstrations,
among them eight students. All Czech universities and institutes were closed;
initially for three years and eventually until the end of
the war which affected more than 15,000 students and 1,300 university teachers.
On the 23rd of September 1941 Hitler relieved Neurath of his active duties and stripped him of
his day-to-day powers. The reason was that despite the persecution of Czech Jews and the harsh
crackdown on protesting students, his rule overall was too lenient by Nazi standards. Neurath,
who even tried to restrain the excesses of his police chief, Karl Frank, still remained the
Reich Protector on paper, but the real power was held by Reinhard Heydrich, who was named
as his deputy on the 29th of September 1941. The Fuhrer gave Heydrich a mandate to enforce policy,
fight resistance to the Nazi regime, and keep up production quotas of Czech motors and arms
that were extremely important to the German war effort. After Heydrich arrived in Prague,
he told his staff "We will Germanize the Czech vermin “ and demanded racial classification of
those who could and could not be Germanized. Although the working relationship between
Heydrich and his Minister of State, Karl Hermann Frank, was initially tense, the two of them,
both being ambitious and brutal, became an effective duo in treating the Czechs harshly.
On the following month, in October 1941, the systematic deportation of Jews from
the territory of the Protectorate started with the transports to the Lodz Ghetto which
was located in German-occupied Poland. By the 3rd of November the same year, 5000 Jews were
deported to the ghetto. Only 277 out of 5000 Jews deported to the Lodz Ghetto survived.
In November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, established the Theresienstadt Ghetto which was located in
the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
The first transport of Czech Jews arrived in the same month.
Heydrich and Frank launched a reign of terror in the Protectorate. According to Heydrich's
estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested and between 400 and 500 were executed
by February 1942. The Czechs nicknamed their Nazi Minister of State “ Bloody Dog Frank” .
One of the arrested and executed Czechs during the Nazi occupation was Alois Eliáš who served
as prime minister of the puppet government of the German-occupied Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia from the 27th of April 1939 to the 27th of September 1941 when he
was arrested because of his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance. Eliáš was the only
head of government who was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. He was executed
on the 19th of June 1942, less than one month after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich was in his convertible Mercedes when the Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef
Gabčík and Jan Kubiš mortally wounded the Nazi architect of the Holocaust on the
27th of May 1942. Heydrich contracted an infection and died 8 days later.
Reinhard Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin was attended by all the high-ranking
Nazi officials including his superior Heinrich Himmler and
Adolf Hitler himself who spoke at the funeral and promised revenge.
Karl Frank and new deputy director of the protectorate Kurt Daluege played a key role
in the civilian massacre and destruction of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky which
occurred on the 9th of June 1942. To revenge Heydrich’s death,
Frank ordered the shooting of all men in Lidice, sending all the women to the
concentration camps and placing those children considered worthy of Germanization in the care
of SS families. Children not worthy of Germanization were also murdered.
Frank was seen personally coming to inspect the destruction of the village and was said
to be satisfied with the results. In total 340 inhabitants of Lidice were slaughtered - 192 men,
60 women and 88 children. All the men and boys were shot and buried in one common
grave and children were murdered in gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp.
4 pregnant women were forced to undergo abortions in the same hospital where Heydrich died.
Deportations of Jews also continued after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. On the 26th
of October 1942, less than 48 hours after the arrival of the last transport from Theresienstadt
to Treblinka, the SS dispatched the first transport to Auschwitz, carrying 1,866 persons.
Upon arrival, SS officials selected 247 people, mostly men, to be registered as prisoners.
The remaining 1,619 were killed in the gas chambers.
In June 1943 Frank was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer which was a
rank equivalent to general and he was also made a General of the Waffen-SS.
Because in May 1943, deputy Reich protector Daluege became seriously ill after a massive
heart attack, he was relieved of all of his day-to-day responsibilities in August the
same year and Wilhelm Frick was appointed new Reich Protector. The same month Frank was made
Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia and was granted cabinet rank and status.
In 1944, Frank personally conducted anti-partisan warfare in Moravia aimed
at destroying the Jan Žižka partisan brigade which was the largest partisan unit in the
Protectorate. On the 3rd of November, Karl Hermann Frank ordered the summary
executions of suspected partisans along with those suspected of helping them. The
bodies of the executed suspects were to be hanged in public for 48 hours.
Despite these executions and deployment of 13,000 soldiers, the Germans were unable
to destroy the partisan brigade which remained active until the end of the war.
In April 1945 when Frank saw that his reign of terror was over, he decided to flee from
Prague and surrender to the Americans as he was afraid of being captured by the Russians.
On the 9th of May 1945 Karl Frank was arrested by the US army troops but his plan did not work
out as he was extradited back to Prague and tried by the People’s court in 1946.
Although no attorney wanted to defend him, he did eventually get one. At the trial he claimed
that he did not feel guilty but co-responsible because he had just followed the orders he had
been given and had represented only a small part of the criminal Nazi regime.
He denied personal responsibility for the executions, although he admitted before the
tribunal that they could be "regarded according to human feelings and human laws as a murder."
On the 21st of May 1946 the People’s court sentenced Karl Hermann Frank to death by hanging
for treason and the massacre of civilians of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
Frank did not accept his fate. Even though he had never shown mercy to any of the Czech people,
he appealed to Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš for leniency. Frank wrote
to Beneš “I believe that as a victor you will show mercy and grant me life"”.
However, he was wrong. There was no reply to his telegraphed appeal.
His execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror. More than 5000 people,
including 7 surviving women from Lidice who sat in the front row, gathered in Pankrác prison to
witness the execution of the most hated man in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Karl Hermann Frank was hanged on the 22nd of May 1946 at the age of
48. An avowed Nazi until the bitter end, his last words were “Germany must live
even if we die. Long live the German nation. Long live the German spirit.”
His second wife, Karola was arrested, taken to the Soviet Union and sentenced to a twelve-year
imprisonment. In the end, she spent 10 years in Kazakhstan's Gulag performing forced labor.
She was released in 1955 and moved to West Germany where she also managed to
find their 3 children who grew up in new families under new names.
There were no tears shed for Karl Hermann Frank.
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