On October 1, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the International Military Tribunal delivered its verdict after more than ten months of proceedings against 21 defendants drawn from the most important political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany. These high-ranking representatives of the criminal Nazi regime were finally made to answer for the unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World War.
It was only the first of many war crime trials held after the war, and it would become a warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere once the true extent of the German atrocities, especially against Jews, was revealed. Twelve of the 21 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging.
One of them was the former head of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland, a man responsible for the exploitation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians as well as the deportation and murder of Polish Jews. His name was Hans Frank.
Hans Michael Frank was born on May 23, 1900, in Karlsruhe, then part of the German Empire. He was the second of three children. His father Carl was a successful lawyer, and his mother Magdalena was the daughter of a prosperous banker.
In 1910, when Hans Frank was ten years old, his mother left the family for a lover in Prague. The First World War began on July 28, 1914. Frank grew up in Munich, where he graduated from Maximilian's Gymnasium, and joined the German Army at the age of 17, though he did not serve at the front.
In the aftermath of the First World War, which ended on November 11, 1918, and during the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Frank served in the Freikorps, independent paramilitary units that took part in the crackdown on the Bavarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived unrecognized socialist state in Bavaria. Composed primarily of returning war veterans, the Freikorps fought against Communists and other groups they believed were responsible for Germany's defeat.
During this time Frank was also a member of the Thule Society, a German occultist group founded in Munich shortly after the war and named after a mythical northern country in Greek legend. The society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the German Workers Party, which Frank and other members of the Thule Society joined in 1919. The German Workers Party dissolved in February 1920, once the precursor of the Nazi Party, officially known as the National Socialist German Workers Party.
Frank waited until September 1923 to become a member of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts. One of the SA's first organized activities was the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government.
The plotters hoped to march on Berlin to launch a national revolution, but the insurrection failed miserably. Units of the Munich police clashed with the Nazi Stormtroopers as they marched into the city center, and the two groups exchanged fire, resulting in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers. The ringleaders, including Hitler, were arrested. Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison, but served only eight months.
In the aftermath of the failed putsch, Frank fled to Italy, where he learned Italian, and returned to Munich only in 1924 after the pending legal proceedings were stayed. On April 2, 1925, Hans Frank married Brigitte Herbst, then a 29-year-old stenographer in the Bavarian State Parliament and later a secretary at Munich University.
Brigitte, who had often told friends she had to be married before her 30th birthday, grew up in modest circumstances and from a young age aspired to a higher standard of living. In Hans Frank, five years younger, a fun-loving Bavarian from a wealthy family of lawyers who had just received a doctorate in law, she found someone who could fulfill her ambitions.
The marriage was not very cordial, as Frank could not assert himself against his dominant wife. Though Brigitte neither had maternal feelings nor was particularly fond of children, she made Hans Frank the father of five children, two daughters and three sons, including Nicholas Frank, born between 1927 and 1939. Brigitte used the children to control her husband; when she needed him to do something, she would say, "Hans, I bore you five children."
In an interview, Nicholas Frank said his mother Brigitte had done her driver's license in Adolf Hitler's car, but that she did not like Hitler because he had stinky breath. In 1929, Hitler appointed Hans Frank, who rose to become his personal legal advisor, as head of the legal department of the Nazi Party.
As the Nazis rose to power, Frank also served as the party's lawyer, representing it in over 2,400 cases. This sometimes brought him into conflict with other lawyers. Once a former teacher appealed to him, saying, "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."
One of the factors that helped the Nazis rise to power was propaganda, used throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s to boost Hitler's image. As a result of this and other factors, he became extremely popular. The Nazi Party's meteoric rise began in 1930, when it attained 107 seats in Germany's Parliament. One of the Reichstag members became Hans Frank.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in January 1933. In April of that year, Frank was appointed Minister of Justice for Bavaria, serving until December 1934, when he was named a Reich minister without portfolio in the Reich government.
On June 2, 1933, he was made Reichsleiter in charge of legal affairs, the second-highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On June 26, 1933, Frank founded the Academy for German Law. At its inaugural meeting on October 2, 1933, he was named its leader, and in August 1934 he was renamed its president.
The academy was charged with promoting reform of German legal life by working in liaison with legislative bodies to implement the National Socialist program in the fields of law and economics. Hans Frank also served as chairman of the academy's legal philosophy committee and was editor of its several publications.
In January 1934, Frank was named as one of the three judges on the Supreme Party Court, an internal Nazi Party tribunal established by Adolf Hitler in 1925 to settle intra-party problems and disputes. Hans 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 the judicial process was that 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 Nazi ideology, especially as expressed in the party program and in the speeches of the leader, was the basis for interpreting legal sources.
At a lecture on National Socialist legal policy in Rome in April 1936, Frank met Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, with whom he soon developed a cordial relationship, not least because he was able to talk to him without an interpreter. At the end of September 1936, Frank traveled to Rome again to bring Mussolini Hitler's invitation to visit Germany, and was Mussolini's personal advisor on that visit.
On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools, and destroyed hundreds of synagogues. Ninety-one Jews were murdered, and the German authorities sent almost 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps, primarily Dachau.
This was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from anti-Semitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate in the Holocaust. Many Jews understood that they had to leave Germany. Brigitte Frank never helped any of them, though before the Nazis rose to power she used to deal with them trading in furs. When one such Jew was standing in a big row to get a visa, he saw Brigitte Frank walking with two friends. When he asked her, "Do you remember me? I need a visa for my family," she turned away and did nothing.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland. Poland found itself fighting a two-front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and one day later, in accordance with a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland.
They divided Poland into thirds: the western third annexed to Germany, the eastern third annexed to the Soviet Union, and the middle third turned into a semi-independent administrative unit called the General Government, of which Hans Frank was appointed governor-general by Adolf Hitler himself. The reason was that his Führer knew that Frank would not make any difficulties.
When Hans Frank personally received the order from Hitler to take over the reign in occupied Poland, he came back from the Führer to his wife in the Berlin villa, immediately knelt down in front of her, and said, "Brigitte, you will become the queen of Poland." Frank described the policy he intended to put into effect by stating, "Poland shall be treated like a colony. The Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German World Empire."
He was the most important administrator in the region, but he was not free to govern as he pleased, as the racial policies carried out in the General Government were the responsibility of the SS and the police. Frank did not oppose these goals, but he hated others infringing on his domain. When Hans Frank asked Himmler, the head of the SS, what he was doing there when the SS was building the first concentration camp, Himmler told him, "It's none of your business."
Hitler meant for the General Government to be used as a racial dumping ground, an endless supply of slave labor, and a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry. The General Government had a total population of 12 million, of which 1.5 million were Jews. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they attached Eastern Galicia to the General Government, adding between three and four million people to the population.
The Germans treated the Poles of the General Government in a terrible fashion and viewed them as a cheap labor source to be taken advantage of at any occasion. All opposition was crushed with the utmost harshness. A reign of terror was instituted, backed by summary police courts which ordered such actions as the public shootings of groups of 20 to 200 Poles and the widespread shootings of hostages.
In 1940, Frank gave an indication of the extent of this reign of terror by his cynical comment to a newspaper reporter on Constantin Fotitch's poster announcing the execution of Czech students. He said, "In Prague, big red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, if I had put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper."
For his horrific treatment of the Polish people, Hans Frank became known as "The Butcher of Poland." In addition, the economic demands made on the General Government were far in excess of the needs of the army of occupation and were out of all proportion to the resources of the country. The food raised in Poland was shipped to Germany on such a wide scale that the rations of the population of the occupied territories were reduced to starvation level, and epidemics were widespread.
The Jews of the General Government were subject to terribly harsh decrees, and from the very beginning the Germans confiscated their property and made them perform forced labor. From late 1939, the Jews were put into ghettos, where they were totally isolated from the outside world and severely restricted. In a speech to his staff on November 25, 1939, Frank openly described it as a joy to finally be able to physically approach the Jewish race. He even said the more that die, the better.
On October 16, 1940, Hans Frank announced the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated at over 400,000 Jews.
German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room. Proper hygiene was almost impossible, as many homes did not have running water. Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions led to disease, starvation, and the death of thousands of Jews each month.
An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared to 2,613 calories for the Germans. An official German order stated that the basic provisioning for the Jewish residential district must be less than the minimum necessary for preserving life, regardless of the consequences. The hunger in the ghetto was so great that dying people lay on the streets and small children were seen begging. Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
When a resident of the Warsaw Ghetto passed away, their families would place the body in the streets, and it would be picked up in the morning by a funeral cart that made its rounds every day. On December 16, 1941, Hans Frank spoke out to his senior officials about the approaching annihilation of the Jews.
He said, "The Jews are exceptionally harmful feeders for us. I have started negotiations for the purpose of having the Jews pushed off to the east. In January there will be a major conference on this question in Berlin. 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 the Ostland, in villages? We were told in Berlin, why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in the Ostland or in their 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."
And they did. In the spring of 1942, the Germans began deporting the Jews from the ghettos to extermination camps located in the Lublin district, and by 1944 all the ghettos in the General Government had been liquidated. While millions of Poles were dying of hunger or being murdered in the German killing centers and concentration camps, the Frank family was accustomed to living the lavish lifestyle of good food, large homes, and a lot of money.
Hans Frank ruled Poland as a king, and his wife Brigitte often called herself queen of Poland. From November 1939, Hans Frank resided at Kraków's Wawel Castle, the ancestral seat of the Polish kings, where he ordered Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine," one of only three oil paintings by da Vinci in the entire world, to hang in his office. The General Government was soon mockingly called "Frankreich" by party comrades.
Hans Frank employed chauffeurs, housekeepers, servants, and cooks, and plundered art treasures from the property of the Catholic Church and the Polish nobility. Frank was artistic and musical; he played the piano, was an opera lover and a chess player, and used to associate with artists like the German composer Richard Strauss, who even wrote a hymn in praise of Hans Frank.
Frank's private residence, Schloss Kressendorf, which served as his family's weekend home, was decorated with furniture stolen from Polish aristocratic palaces. In an interview, Hans Frank's son Nicholas remembered how his mother would throw away all good-looking servants because she was afraid that her cheating husband Hans would sleep with all of them, as he did not care much about who he was sleeping with.
Nicholas also said that he had never discussed Jews at home, but remembered that there were railways close to their weekend home and all the trains full of Jews deported to Auschwitz passed by the castle Kressendorf. Nicholas remembered how on a few occasions Frank's sister went to the Kraków Plaszow concentration camp and told the incoming Jews that she would help them survive if they gave her diamonds. However, she never helped anybody.
Frank's wife Brigitte took advantage of the German terror as well. She drove to the ghettos of Kraków and Warsaw in her open chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz to procure jewelry, furs, and other valuables. In 1942, Hans Frank, a notorious womanizer, met Lilly Groh, his childhood sweetheart, whom he intended to leave his wife for and marry.
However, Brigitte Frank did not want to give up her status and even said, "I'd rather be the widow than the divorcee of a Reich Minister." Brigitte, a self-proclaimed queen of Poland, had many extramarital affairs as well, and she had several abortions because she was not sure who the father was.
In order to get rid of Groh, she not only described her husband's lover as a Jew to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, but she intervened with Hitler, who told Frank that he could divorce Brigitte only if he resigned from his position. However, this never happened, though Hans Frank later claimed that he submitted resignation requests to Hitler on 14 occasions but Hitler would not allow him to resign. The truth was that he did not want to give up his power.
In 1942, Frank became involved in a temporary dispute with Himmler as to the type of legal system which should be in effect in Germany, and he annoyed Hitler with a series of speeches at universities in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich in which he criticized the police state and pleaded for an independent judiciary. Hitler then banned Frank from speaking outside the General Government and excluded him from all offices in the Reich. Frank was dismissed as Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party and as president of the Academy for German Law.
In January 1944, a special train with Frank traveling to Lviv was derailed after an explosive device was discharged. Though no one was killed, around 100 Polish hostages from Kraków's Montelupich prison were executed as punishment for the act. On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began when the Polish Home Army, a non-communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw.
The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River, but the Soviets failed to intervene. A total of 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the Polish Home Army or had been discovered in hiding.
On October 16, 1944, Hans Frank hosted a dinner at Wawel Castle in honor of Oskar Dirlewanger, the Nazi officer and pedophile who led his 4,000 butchers, rapists, and looters into action against the Warsaw Uprising and quickly committed such unspeakable crimes that both Army and SS commanders demanded the unit's withdrawal. Frank expressed his gratitude and appreciation for the exemplary operations carried out by his group in the course of fighting in Warsaw.
On January 17, 1945, as the Soviet Army advanced, Hans Frank fled Kraków with three trucks full of art, including paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, and da Vinci, and a fake passport with the name "Fischer" to leave for Argentina with the help of the Catholic Church. However, Frank did not leave Germany, as he did not believe that after the war he would be tried before the Military Tribunal. He thought that in the worst-case scenario he and other Nazis would be sent to the Netherlands, as was the case with Kaiser Wilhelm II after World War I, and they would enjoy the possessions looted during the war years.
When he was later asked about the looted art treasures, he responded, "An accusation which is one that touches my private life and affects me most deeply is that I am supposed to have enriched myself with the art treasures of the country entrusted to me. I did not collect pictures and I did not find time during the war to appropriate art treasures. I took care to see that all the art treasures of the country entrusted to me were officially registered." However, the three trucks full of art with which he fled from Kraków did not fall into this category.
On May 4, 1945, Frank was captured by American troops at Tegernsee in southern Bavaria. The troops which arrested him were the same troops that had liberated Dachau five days earlier and had witnessed atrocities of the Nazi regime firsthand. After his capture, Frank was made to walk a gauntlet of American soldiers, all of whom beat him.
Frank crumbled under this pressure, unable to survive the thought of even harsher treatment, and attempted suicide. When that attempt failed, he tried yet again just 48 hours later, ineffectively cutting his left wrist. He would later say, "I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. That man, whom we sacrificed everything for, left us all alone."
As his son Nicholas told us, his father had attempted to commit suicide because he did not want to be treated like he had treated others. Brigitte Frank also faced a challenging time. All their friends were gone and nobody wanted to have anything to do with them. In order to buy food, she had to sell all the possessions, including jewelry stolen from the murdered Jews and paintings they had taken with them from Kraków. What remained was confiscated. However, she still hoped her husband would be released and even planned another child with him.
Instead, Hans Frank was tried at the Nuremberg trials, held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. He faced three charges: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. At the beginning of his testimony, Frank stated that he had a feeling of terrible guilt for the atrocities committed in the occupied territories, but his defense was largely devoted to an attempt to prove that he was not in fact responsible, that he ordered only the necessary pacification measures, though the excesses were due to the activities of the police which were not under his control, and that he never even knew of the activities of the concentration camps. As Nicholas Frank confirmed, his parents knew everything about the extermination camps.
During the Nuremberg trials, Brigitte Frank was visited several times by a Jewish journalist, Gaston Ullmann, who wrote a piece every day about what was happening in the trial. He would sometimes bring the Franks' children chocolate, and Brigitte mentioned Ullmann in a letter to her husband, saying, "He is a Jew, but I think he has a human heart."
During the trial, Hans Frank converted to Roman Catholicism and claimed to have had a series of religious experiences. He also accused the Allies, especially the Soviets, of their own wartime atrocities, and he and Albert Speer were the only defendants to show any degree of remorse for their crimes. He also said, "I myself, speaking from the very depths of my feelings and having lived through the five months of this trial, want to say that now, after I have gained a full insight into all the horrible atrocities which have been committed, I am possessed by a deep sense of guilt. Those of us who are guilty must pay the price."
And he did. On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Hans Frank guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. According to the verdict, Frank was a willing and knowing participant in the use of terrorism in Poland, in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way which led to the death by starvation of a large number of people, in the deportation to Germany as slave laborers of over one million Poles, and in a program involving the murder of at least three million Jews.
After receiving the death sentence, Frank said, "Death by hanging. I deserve it and I expected it." Frank was executed by American Army Sergeant John C. Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman. It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job to make the ten Nazi war criminals that he executed that day suffer, as they all died an agonizing death.
The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. Additionally, the trapdoor was too small, causing several of the condemned to suffer bleeding head injuries as they fell.
On October 16, 1946, the day of his execution, Hans Frank was the fifth of the Nuremberg defendants to mount the scaffold. He was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his face. After he had said his last words, "I am thankful for the kind of treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy," Frank was hanged.
Because he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his horrible convulsing lasted 11 long minutes before he died. He was 46 years old. After that, his corpse was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the river Isar. Sergeant Woods later not only insisted that he had performed all executions correctly but also stated he was very proud of his work.
After the war, Hans Frank's wife Brigitte never said anything positive about the Third Reich and died on March 9, 1959. The Franks' children coped with the family's Nazi past very differently. In 1987, Nicholas wrote a book about his father titled "The Father: A Settling of Accounts," in which he denounced his father and questioned his remorse before his execution. One of his brothers accused him of lying.
Hans Frank's daughter Sigrid moved to South Africa because she liked her part there, and the other daughter, Brigitte, while suffering from cancer, committed suicide at the age of 46 because she did not want to live longer than her father, who was hanged at the same age. There were no tears shared for Hans Frank.