Karl Hermann Frank was born on January 24, 1898, in Carlsbad, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father Heinrich was an elementary school teacher and an ardent German nationalist who raised his son steeped in the German nationalist movement.
When Karl was nine or ten, he was hit in the eye by a rock while playing with other children. Doctors tried for years to save the eye, but it had to be removed in 1918 and replaced with a glass one.
Frank was 16 when the First World War began on July 28, 1914. He attempted to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army but was rejected because of the blindness in his right eye.
In October 1918, the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia. Fifty percent of the new country's population consisted of Czechs, while Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and 16 percent respectively.
Frank was a Sudeten German, the name for ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia. In the new state, he became an extreme advocate of incorporating the Sudetenland, where he lived, into Germany.
He joined the protofascist German National Socialist Workers' Party in 1919. Six years later, in 1925, he opened a bookstore specializing in National-Socialist literature.
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933. One reason was that many Germans could not accept 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 destroy the German army. They interpreted the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and its steep compensation payments as revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice.
From 1933, the Nazi regime began restricting the civil and human rights of Jews and established the first concentration camps. It also demanded the "return" of the Sudetenland to the German Reich.
That same year, the First Czechoslovak Republic outlawed the German National Socialist Workers' Party. On October 1, 1933, Konrad Henlein, a leading Sudeten German politician, created the Sudeten-German Homeland Front, which Frank joined and helped organize.
In April 1935, following a mandatory demand of the Czechoslovak government, the party was renamed the Sudeten German Party, or SdP. In parliamentary elections on May 19, 1935, the SdP won 15.2 percent of the vote and became the strongest party in Czechoslovakia.
Frank was elected a member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, and the same year he became deputy leader of the SdP. The party gradually became more radical.
Meanwhile, the influence of the German Nazi dictatorship grew 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 apart and joining it with Nazi Germany.
The SdP coordinated this policy with Nazi leaders in order to integrate the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich. By 1938, the party had over 1.3 million members, accounting for 40.6 percent of ethnic-German citizens of Czechoslovakia, making it one of the largest fascist parties in Europe at the time.
The situation culminated on April 24, 1938, when at a convention in Carlsbad, Henlein presented demands to the Czechoslovak government. These included complete equality between Sudeten Germans and Czechs, legal recognition of the Sudeten Germans, self-government, and the freedom to decide on annexation to Nazi Germany.
The Czechoslovak government rejected the demands but stated it was willing to provide more minority rights to the German minority. Between March 11 and 13, 1938, Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich.
The failure of Britain and France to take action against Hitler 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.
That part of Czechoslovakia also contained the Czechoslovak Army's defensive positions in the event of a war with Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich between September 29 and 30, 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 and felt betrayed by the British and French governments.
Many Sudeten Germans welcomed the German annexation, and Frank was one of them. Konrad Henlein was appointed Gauleiter, a regional leader of the Nazi Party of the Sudetenland, and Frank was made his deputy.
On November 1, 1938, Frank joined the Nazi Party and the SS. On March 15, 1939, less than six months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the remaining parts of Czechoslovakia.
This established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which, by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs. Immediately after the occupation began, the Nazis passed new anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude more than 118,000 Jews 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.
After the occupation of the Czech lands, Frank was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer, a rank equivalent to lieutenant general, 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, named Frank the protectorate's Higher SS and Police Leader. As a result, Frank wielded great power, controlling the Nazi police apparatus, including the intelligence service known as the SD and the Security Police, which consisted of the Gestapo and the Kripo, or Criminal Police.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. During the first months of the protectorate, the Czech public turned to passive resistance, but increasing displays of national sentiment drew the ire of Nazi officials, who soon prohibited singing patriotic songs in public.
Regardless of official bans, new acts of resistance occurred. One took place on the first anniversary of the Munich Agreement, on September 30, 1939, when a boycott of all public transportation in Prague was organized.
A mass demonstration was planned for Czechoslovak Independence Day, October 28. On that day, Czech students took to the streets to demonstrate against the Nazi occupation.
As the demonstration grew, protesters became bolder and expressed 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 fired on the crowd at random. Fifteen people were wounded and two died, including Jan Opletal, a popular medical student.
Opletal's funeral on November 15 gathered around 3,000 students. At first the procession, closely monitored by the security police, was peaceful, but the situation grew tense as smaller groups of students sang hymns and patriotic songs and chanted provocative slogans.
In addition, the driver of Karl Hermann Frank's car was beaten up. The incident angered Frank, who insisted on treating Czechs with a firmer hand, and he did.
On the night of November 16, 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, affecting more than 15,000 students and 1,300 university teachers.
On September 23, 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, remained Reich Protector on paper, but real power was held by Reinhard Heydrich, named as his deputy on September 29, 1941.
Hitler 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 ambitious and brutal men became an effective duo in treating the Czechs harshly.
In October 1941, the systematic deportation of Jews from the territory of the protectorate began with transports to the Lodz Ghetto in German-occupied Poland. By November 3 of that year, 5,000 Jews had been deported to the ghetto.
Only 277 out of the 5,000 Jews deported to the Lodz Ghetto survived. In November 1941, Heydrich established the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The first transport of Czech Jews arrived 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 was Alois Eliáš, who served as prime minister of the puppet government of the German-occupied protectorate from April 27, 1939, to September 27, 1941, when he was arrested for his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Eliáš was the only head of government murdered by the Nazis during World War II. He was executed on June 19, 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 May 27, 1942. Heydrich contracted an infection and died eight days later.
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 the 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 on June 9, 1942.
To avenge Heydrich's death, Frank ordered the shooting of all men in Lidice, the sending of all women to concentration camps, and the placement of 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. Four pregnant women were forced to undergo abortions in the same hospital where Heydrich died.
Deportations of Jews also continued after Heydrich's assassination. On October 26, 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, a rank equivalent to general, and was also made a General of the Waffen-SS. Because deputy Reich Protector Daluege became seriously ill after a massive heart attack in May 1943, he was relieved of his day-to-day responsibilities in August, 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, the largest partisan unit in the protectorate.
On November 3, 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 the 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, afraid of being captured by the Russians. On May 9, 1945, he was arrested by US Army troops.
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 eventually got one.
At the trial, he claimed he did not feel guilty but co-responsible, because he had just followed orders 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 May 21, 1946, the People's Court sentenced Karl Hermann Frank to death by hanging for treason and the massacre of civilians in 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, writing, "I believe that as a victor you will show mercy and grant me life."
He was wrong. There was no reply to his telegraphed appeal. His execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror.
More than 5,000 people, including seven surviving women from Lidice who sat in the front row, gathered at Pankrác prison to witness the execution of the most hated man in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Karl Hermann Frank was hanged on May 22, 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 twelve years' 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 managed to find their three children, who had grown up in new families under new names. There were no tears shed for Karl Hermann Frank.