Branch: Government
Born: 23 May 1900 in Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany.
Died: 16 October 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany.
Appointment's:
Governor-General of the General Government 26 October 1939
to January 1945
Decorations:
Other: Personnel
Articles:
Hans Michael Frank was born on 23 May 1900 and became a German
lawyer who worked for the National Socialist Party during the 1920s and
1930s, and after
Adolf
Hitler's accession to power in 1933, became chief jurist
of Nazi Germany and Governor-General of the 'General Government'
territory of occupied Poland. During his tenure 1939 to 1945,
he instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population
and became directly involved in the mass murder of the Polish
Jews. At the Nuremberg trials, he was found guilty of war
crimes and crimes against humanity and executed.
Hans Frank was born in Karlsruhe, and his parents were Karl
Frank, a lawyer, and his wife Magdalena (née Buchmaier).
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 the command of Franz
Ritter von Epp, and then joined the German Worker's Party
(which soon evolved into NSDAP), in 1919, and was one of the
party's earliest members.
He studied law, passing the final state examination in
1926, and rose to become
Adolf
Hitler's personal legal adviser. In this capacity, Hans
Frank was privy to personal details of
Adolf
Hitler's life. In his memoirs, written shortly before
his execution, Hans Frank made the sensational claim that
he had been commissioned by
Adolf
Hitler to investigate
Adolf
Hitler's family in 1930 after a blackmail letter
had been received from
Adolf
Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, who allegedly
threatened to reveal embarrassing facts about his uncle's
ancestry. Hans Frank said that the investigation uncovered
evidence that Maria Schicklgruber,
Adolf
Hitler's paternal grandmother, had been working as a
cook in the household of a Jewish man named Leopold Hans
Frankenberger before she gave birth to
Adolf
Hitler's father, Alois, out of wedlock. Hans Frank claimed
that he had obtained from a relative of
Adolf
Hitler's by marriage a collection of letters between
Maria Schicklgruber and a member of the Hans Frankenberger
family that discussed a stipend for her after she left the
employ of the family. According to Hans Frank,
Adolf
Hitler told him that the letters did not prove that
the Hans Frankenberger son was his grandfather but rather
his grandmother had merely extorted money from Hans Frankenberger
by threatening to claim his paternity of her illegitimate
child.Hans Frank accepted this explanation, but added that
it was still just possible that
Adolf
Hitler had some Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, 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 (which includes Graz) in the 15th century and
were not allowed to return until the 1860s, scholars such
as Ian Kershaw and Brigitte Hamann dismiss the Hans Frankenberger
hypothesis, which before had only Hans Frank's speculation
to support it as baseless.There is no evidence outside of
Hans Frank's statements for the existence of a Leopold
Hans Frankenberger living in Graz in the 1830s, and
Hans 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. It has been
suggested that Hans Frank, who turned against National Socialism
after 1945, remained an anti-Semitic fanatic, made the claim
that
Adolf
Hitler had Jewish ancestry as way of proving that
Adolf
Hitler was thus really a Jew and not an
Aryan and in this way, proved that
the crimes of the Third Reich were the work of the Jewish
Adolf Hitler.
The full anti-Semitic implications of Hans Frank's story
were borne out in a letter to the editor of a Saudi newspaper
in 1982 by a German man living in Saudi Arabia entitled
Was
Adolf
Hitler a Jew?. The letter-writer accepted Hans
Frank's story as the truth, and added since
Adolf
Hitler was a Jew, the Jews should pay Germans
reparations for the War, since one of theirs caused the
destruction of Germany. The American author Ron Rosenbaum
wrote about Hans Frank:
On the other hand, a different version of Hans Frank
emerges in the brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving
portrait of him by his son, Niklas Hans Frank, who (in a
memoir called In the Shadow of the Reich) 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
Adolf
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
Adolf
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
Adolf
Hitler on him for all posterity. In any case, it was
one Hans Frank knew the victors would find seductive.
As the Nazis rose to power, Hans Frank served as the party's
lawyer, representing it in over 2,400 cases, and spending
over $10,000. This sometimes brought him into conflict with
other lawyers, and one, a former teacher of Hans Frank's
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, Hans 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 with
Adolf
Hitler himself testifying, and the defence successfully
putting the Weimar Republic on trial, and many Army officers
won over to a sympathetic view of the National Socialist
movement.
Hans 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. Hans Frank objected
to extrajudicial killings, both at the Dachau concentration
camp and during the Night of the Long Knives.
Hans Frank's view of what the judicial process required
should not be exaggerated:
The judge's role is to safeguard the concrete order of the
racial community, to eliminate dangerous elements, to prosecute
all acts harmful to the community, and to arbitrate in disagreements
between members of the community. The National Socialist ideology,
especially as expressed in the Party programme and in the
speeches of our Leader, is the basis for interpreting legal
sources.
From 1934, Hans Frank was Reich Minister Without Portfolio.
Wartime career
In September 1939 Hans 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, Hans Frank was assigned Governor-General
of the occupied Polish territories (Generalgouverneur für
die besetzten polnischen Gebiete), controlling the General
Government, the area of Poland not directly incorporated into
Germany (roughly 90,000 km² out of the 187,000 km²
Germany had gained). He was also granted the SS rank of Obergruppenführer.
One of his first operations was the AB Action, aimed at destroying
Polish culture, and in which more than 30,000 Poles (intellectuals
and the upper classes) were arrested and 7,000 were subsequently
massacred. Hans Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews
into ghettos and the use of Polish civilians as forced
and compulsory labour. In 1942 he lost his positions
of authority outside the GG after annoying
Adolf
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 GG. Krüger himself was
ultimately replaced with Wilhelm Koppe.
An assassination attempt by Polish Secret State on 29/30
January 1944 (the night preceding the 11th anniversary of
the appointment of
Adolf
Hitler as Chancellor of Germany) in Szarów near
Krakow failed. A special train with Hans Frank traveling
to Lviv was derailed after an explosive device went off
but no one was killed.
As governor general, Hans Frank stripped away
his appearance of culture stating to his cabinet,
Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of pity. We must
annihilate the Jews.
The General Government was the location of four of the
six extermination camps. Hans Frank later claimed that the
extermination of Jews was entirely controlled by
Heinrich
Himmler and the SS and that he, Hans Frank, was unaware
of the extermination camps in the GG until early in 1944.
During his testimony at Nuremberg, Hans Frank claimed he
submitted resignation requests to
Adolf
Hitler on 14 occasions, but
Adolf
Hitler would not allow him to resign. Hans Frank fled
GG in January 1945, in advance of the Soviet Army.
Hans Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only
possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was
also a good player, and he even received the Ukrainian chess
grandmaster Efim Bogoljubow at the Wawel castle. He was
a patron of General Government chess tournaments (1940 1944).
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
Hans Frank was captured by American troops on 3 May 1945,
at Tegernsee in southern Bavaria. Upon his capture, 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
the faith of his childhood, Roman Catholicism, and claimed
to have a series of religious experiences.
Hans Frank voluntarily surrendered 43 volumes of his personal
diaries to the Allies, which were then used against him
as evidence of his guilt. Hans Frank confessed to some of
the charges put against him and viewed his own execution
as a form of atonement for his sins. Although on the witness
stand he expressed remorse, during the trial, he vacillated
between penitence for his crimes and blaming the Allies,
especially the Soviets, for an equal share of 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. While awaiting execution,
he wrote his memoirs. The sentence was carried out on 16
October by Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Journalist Howard
K. Smith wrote of the execution:
to Hans Frank was next in the parade of death. He was
the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with
a smile on his countenance. And, although nervous and swallowing
frequently, this man, who was converted to Roman Catholicism
after his arrest, gave the appearance of being relieved
at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds.
He and Albert Speer were allegedly the only defendants to
show remorse for their war crimes. My conscience does
not allow me simply to throw the responsibility simply on
minor people... A thousand years will pass and still Germany's
guilt will not have been erased. 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.
On 2 April 1925 Hans Frank married 29-year-old secretary Brigitte
Herbst (1895 1959) from Forst (Lausitz). The wedding took
place in Munich and the couple honeymooned in Venetia. Hans
and Brigitte Hans Frank had five children:
Sigrid Hans Frank (born 13 March 1927, Munich)
Norman Hans Frank (born 3 June 1928, Munich)
Brigitte Hans Frank (born 13 January 1935, Munich)
Michael Hans Frank (born 15 February 1937, Munich)
Niklas Hans Frank (born 9 March 1939, Munich)
Brigitte Hans Frank had a reputation for having a more dominant
personality than her husband, and from 1939 she called herself
a queen of Poland (Königin von Polen).
The marriage was unhappy and became colder from year to
year. When Hans 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! Hans Frank answered:
So you are my deadly enemy!
In 1987, Niklas Hans Frank wrote a book about his father,
Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Settling
of Accounts), which was published in English in 1991
as In the Shadow of the Reich. The book, which was serialized
in the magazine Stern, resulted in controversy in Germany
because of the scathing way in which the younger Hans Frank
depicted his father, referring to him as a slime-hole
of a
Adolf
Hitler fanatic and questioning his remorse before
his execution.
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