Hans Michael Frank was a German lawyer who worked for the Nazi party during the 1920s
and 1930s, and later became Hitler's personal lawyer. After Hitler's ascension to power
in 1933, Frank became Nazi Germany's chief jurist and Governor-General of occupied Poland's
"General Government" territory. During his tenure thoughout World War II, he instituted
a reign of terror against the civilian population, systematic plunder and brutal economic exploitation
and became directly involved in the mass murder of Polish citizens. At the Nuremberg trials,
he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was executed.
Pre-war career Frank was born in Karlsruhe to Karl Frank,
a lawyer, and his wife, Magdalena. He had an older brother, Karl Jr., and a younger
sister, Elisabeth. He joined the German army in 1917, during World War I. After the war
he served in the Freikorps under Franz Ritter von Epp's command, and then joined the German
Worker's Party, in 1919. He was one of the party's earliest members.
Frank studied law and rose to become Adolf Hitler's personal legal adviser. As the Nazis
rose to power, Frank also served as the party's lawyer. He represented it in over 2,400 cases
and spent over $10,000. This sometimes brought him into conflict with other lawyers. One,
a former teacher, appealed to him: "I beg you to leave these people alone! No good will
come of it! Political movements that begin in the criminal courts will end in the criminal
courts!" In September–October 1930, Frank served as the defence lawyer at the court-martial
in Leipzig of Lieutenants Richard Scheringer, Hans Friedrich Wendt and Hanns Ludin, three
Reichswehr officers charged with membership in the NSDAP. The trial was a media sensation.
Hitler himself testified and the defence successfully put the Weimar Republic itself on trial. Many
Army officers developed a sympathetic view of the National Socialist movement as a consequence.
Frank was elected to the Reichstag in 1930, and in 1933 he was made Minister of Justice
for Bavaria. From 1933, he was also the head of the National Socialist Jurists Association
and President of the Academy of German Law. Frank objected to extrajudicial killings as
it weakened the power of the legal system, both at the Dachau concentration camp and
during the Night of the Long Knives. Frank's view of what the judicial process
required should not be exaggerated: From 1934, Frank was Reich Minister Without
Portfolio. Wartime career
In September 1939 Frank was assigned as Chief of Administration to Gerd von Rundstedt in
the German military administration in occupied Poland. From 26 October 1939, following the
end of the invasion of Poland, Frank was assigned Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories,
controlling the General Government, the area of Poland not directly incorporated into Germany.
He was also granted the SS rank of Obergruppenführer. Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews
into ghettos, especially the enormous Warsaw ghetto, and the use of Polish civilians as
forced labour. In 1942 he lost his positions of authority outside the General Government
after annoying Hitler with a series of speeches in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich
and also as part of a power struggle with Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the State Secretary
for Security – head of the SS and the police in the General Government. Krüger himself
was ultimately replaced with Wilhelm Koppe. On 16 December 1941, Frank spelt out to his
senior officials the approaching annihilation of the Jews:
"A great Jewish migration will begin in any case. But what should we do with the Jews?
Do you think they will be settled in Ostland, in villages? We were told in Berlin, 'Why
all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat.
So liquidate them yourselves.' Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings
of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible."
When this was read to him at the Nuremberg trials he said:
"One has to take the diary as a whole. You can not go through 43 volumes and pick out
single sentences and separate them from their context. I would like to say here that I do
not want to argue or quibble about individual phrases. It was a wild and stormy period filled
with terrible passions, and when a whole country is on fire and a life and death struggle is
going on, such words may easily be used... Some of the words are terrible. I myself must
admit that I was shocked at many of the words which I had used.
An assassination attempt by Polish Secret State on 29/30 January 1944 in Szarów near
Krakow failed. A special train with Frank traveling to Lviv was derailed after an explosive
device discharged but no one was killed. Death camps
The General Government was the location of four of the six extermination camps, namely,
Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor. Chelmno and Birkenau fell just outside the borders
of the General Government. Frank later claimed that the extermination of Jews was entirely
controlled by Heinrich Himmler and the SS and that he, Frank, was unaware of the extermination
camps in the General Government until early in 1944, a surprising claim and one found
to be untrue by the Nuremberg tribunal. During his testimony at Nuremberg, Frank claimed
he submitted resignation requests to Hitler on 14 occasions, but Hitler would not allow
him to resign. Frank fled the General Government in January 1945 as the Soviet Army advanced.
Chess Hans Frank took an avid interest in chess.
He was a good player, and possessed an extensive library of chess literature. He received the
Ukrainian chess grandmaster Efim Bogoljubow at Wawel castle. Frank was a patron of General
Government chess tournaments. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Krakow.
Six months later he announced the establishment of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the
World Chess Champion, Dr. Alexander Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October
1942 at the "Literary Café" in Krakow. Capture and trial
Frank was captured by American troops on 3 May 1945, at Tegernsee in southern Bavaria.
He was manhandled and beaten, walking the gauntlet of American soldiers, and because
of that, he tried to cut his own throat; two days later, he lacerated his left arm while
attempting to slit his wrists in a second unsuccessful suicide attempt. He was indicted
for war crimes and tried before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20 November
1945 to 1 October 1946. During the trial he renewed, guided by Fr. Sixtus O'Connor OFM,
the faith of his childhood, Roman Catholicism, and claimed to have had a series of religious
experiences. Frank voluntarily surrendered 43 volumes of
his personal diaries to the Allies, which were then used against him as evidence of
his guilt. Frank confessed to some of the charges and expressed remorse on the witness
stand, showing penitence for his crimes. On the witness stand, he said, "after having
heard the testimony of, the witness Rudolf Höss, my conscience does not allow me to
throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never installed an extermination
camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally
has laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought
against Jewry for years; and we have indulged in the most horrible utterances." He and Albert
Speer were allegedly the only defendants to show remorse for their war crimes. At the
same time he accused the Allies, especially the Soviets, of their own wartime atrocities.
The former Governor-General of Poland was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against
humanity on 1 October 1946, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Frank viewed his sentence
as a form of atonement for his sins. The death sentence was carried out on 16 October
by Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Journalist Joseph Kingsbury-Smith wrote of the execution:
He answered to his name quietly and when asked for any last statement, he replied "I am thankful
for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy."
Memoirs While awaiting execution, he wrote his memoirs.
In the capacity as his attorney, Frank was privy to personal details of Hitler's life.
In his memoirs, written shortly before his execution, Frank made the sensational claim
that Hitler had commissioned him to investigate Hitler's family in 1930 after a "blackmail
letter" had been received from Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, who allegedly threatened
to reveal embarrassing facts about his uncle's ancestry. Frank said that the investigation
uncovered evidence that Maria Schicklgruber, Hitler's paternal grandmother, had been working
as a cook in the household of a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger before she gave
birth to Hitler's father, Alois, out of wedlock. Frank claimed that he had obtained from a
relative of Hitler's by marriage a collection of letters between Maria Schicklgruber and
a member of the Frankenberger family that discussed a stipend for her after she left
the family's employ. According to Frank, Hitler told him that the letters did not prove that
the Frankenberger son was his grandfather but rather his grandmother had merely extorted
money from Frankenberger by threatening to claim his paternity of her illegitimate child.
Frank accepted this explanation, but added that it was still just possible that Hitler
had some Jewish ancestry. But he thought it unlikely because, "...from his entire demeanor,
the fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood coursing through his veins seems so clearly
evident that nothing more need be said on this."
Given that all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria in the 15th century
and were not allowed to return until the 1860s, scholars such as Ian Kershaw and Brigitte
Hamann dismiss as baseless the Frankenberger hypothesis, which before had only Frank's
speculation to support it. There is no evidence outside of Frank's statements for the existence
of a "Leopold Frankenberger" living in Graz in the 1830s, and Frank's story is notably
inaccurate on several points such as the claim that Maria Schicklgruber came from "Leonding
near Linz", when in fact she came from the hamlet of Strones near the village of Döllersheim.
Some suggest that Frank made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as way of proving
that Hitler was really a "Jew" and not an "Aryan"; and in this way, "proved" that the
Third Reich's crimes were the work of the "Jewish" Hitler. The full anti-Semitic implications
of Frank's story were borne out in a letter entitled "Was Hitler a Jew?", written to the
editor of a Saudi newspaper in 1982 by a German man living in Saudi Arabia. The writer accepted
Frank's story as the truth, and added since Hitler was a Jew, "the Jews should pay Germans
reparations for the War, because one of theirs caused the destruction of Germany". But American
author Ron Rosenbaum suggested another reason for Frank's story:
"On the other hand, a different version of Frank emerges in the brilliantly vicious,
utterly unforgiving portrait of him by his son, Niklas Frank, who depicts his father
as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct
for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement. For this Hans Frank, disgraced and facing
death on the gallows for following Hitler, fabricating such a story might be a cunning
way of ensuring his place in history as the one man who gave the world the hidden key
to the mystery of Hitler's psyche. While at the same time, revenging himself on his former
master for having led him to this end by foisting a sordid and humiliating explanation of Hitler
on him for all posterity. In any case, it was one Frank knew the victors would find
seductive".
Family On 2 April 1925 Frank married 29-year-old
secretary Brigitte Herbst from Forst. The wedding took place in Munich and the couple
honeymooned in Venetia. Hans and Brigitte Frank had five children:
Sigrid Frank Norman Frank
Brigitte Frank Michael Frank
Niklas Frank Brigitte Frank had a reputation for having
a more dominant personality than her husband: after 1939 she called herself "a queen of
Poland". The marriage was unhappy and became colder from year to year. When Frank sought
a divorce in 1942, Brigitte gave everything to save their marriage in order to remain
the "First Lady in the General Government". One of her most famous comments was "I'd rather
be widowed than divorced from a Reichsminister!" Frank answered: "So you are my deadly enemy!"
In 1987, Niklas Frank wrote a book about his father, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung, which
was published in English in 1991 as In the Shadow of the Reich. The book, which was serialized
in the magazine Stern, caused controversy in Germany because of the scathing way in
which the younger Frank depicted his father: Niklas referred to him as "a slime-hole of
a Hitler fanatic" and questioned his remorse before his execution.
Niklas is the sole living child of Hans and Brigitte Frank. Sigrid remained a committed
Nazi who emigrated to South Africa during the apartheid regime and died there. Brigitte
committed suicide in 1981; Michael and Norman died in 1990 and 2010, respectively.
In literature Curzio Malaparte, an Italian writer who during
the war also served as a reservist Italian army officer, and unofficial diplomat because
of his ties with Germany, wrote extensively in his 1944 opus "Kaputt!" on Frank and the
convivial dinners the Governor held in his mansions outside Warsaw and Cracow for Malaparte
and other guests. He also mentions that Frank was a capable piano player.
Quotations In a 1940 interview in the Völkischer Beobachter:
Portrayal in the media Hans Frank has been portrayed by the following
actors in film, television and theater productions. Hans Schwarz Jr. in the 1954 West German film
Geld aus der Luft Lothar Bellag in the 1968 East German television
miniseries Wege übers Land. Voja Miric in the 1971 Yugoslavian television
production Nirnberski epilog Jerzy Duszyński in the 1976 Polish film Ocalić
miasto John Bailey in the 1978 United States television
production Holocaust Robert Austin in the 1984 United States television
production Pope John Paul II Frank Moore in the 2000 Canadian/U.S. T.V.
production Nuremberg Matt Craven in the 2005 Polish television
production Karol, un uomo diventato Papa Andreas Conrad in the 2005 German T.V. miniseries
Speer und Er. Harald Posch in the 2005 ItalianPolish television
production Pope John Paul II Will Keen in the 2011 BBC production The Man
Who Crossed Hitler See also
German war crimes Glossary of Nazi Germany
List of Nazi Party leaders and officials The Holocaust in Poland
Command responsibility References
External links Testimony of Frank at Nuremberg