Karl Hermann Frank was born on January 24, 1898, in Kadaň, today part of the Czech Republic but then part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Heinrich, was an elementary school teacher and a German nationalist who raised his son steeped in the German nationalist movement.
When Frank was nine or ten years old, he was hit in the right eye by a rock while playing with other children. When World War I began on July 28, 1914, the sixteen-year-old Frank tried to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army but was rejected because of the blindness in his right eye. In 1918, after doctors tried for a long time to fix the eye, it was removed and replaced with a glass one.
In October 1918, the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia. Half of the new state's population consisted of Czechs, while Germans accounted for 22 percent and Slovaks 16 percent. Frank was a Sudeten German, the name for ethnic Germans living within Czechoslovakia, and he became an extreme advocate of incorporating the Sudetenland into Germany.
In 1919, he joined the proto-fascist German National Socialist Workers Party of Germans in Czechoslovakia. Six years later, in 1925, Frank opened a bookstore specializing in National Socialist literature.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the 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.
Between March 11 and 13, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich. The failure of Britain and France to act against him for violating the Treaty of Versailles 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 Czechs and Slovaks were not even invited to the conference and felt betrayed by the British and French governments.
Many Sudeten Germans welcomed the German annexation, and Karl Hermann Frank was one of them. He was appointed Deputy Gauleiter, or regional leader, of the Nazi Party in the Sudetenland, and on November 1, 1938, he 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. Hitler himself arrived in Prague, and on March 16, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, he established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which by contrast to the Sudetenland consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
Immediately after the Nazis began occupying the whole country, they 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 half a billion dollars' worth of Jewish property in the protectorate, equivalent to about 11 billion United States dollars today.
After the occupation of the Czech lands, Frank was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer, a rank equivalent to major 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, also named Frank the protectorate's Higher SS and Police Leader.
In this position, Frank wielded great power, controlling the Nazi police apparatus including the intelligence service, the SD, and the security police, which consisted of the Gestapo and the Kripo, or criminal police.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. On February 17, 1940, Frank divorced his wife Anna Müller, whom he had married in January 1921 and with whom he had two sons. Two months after his divorce, on April 14, 1940, he married Karola Blaschek, a doctor fifteen years his junior. Their marriage produced three children: daughters Eda and Holle and a son, Wolf-Dietrich.
Two years after the war began, on September 23, 1941, Hitler relieved von 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 acts of resistance, his rule overall was too lenient by Nazi standards. Von Neurath, who even tried to restrain the excesses of his police chief Karl Hermann Frank, still remained Reich Protector on paper, but real power was held by Reinhard Heydrich, who was named 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 Frank was initially tense, the two men, both ambitious and brutal, became an effective duo in treating the Czechs harshly. In October 1941, just one month after Heydrich's arrival, the systematic deportation of Jews from the protectorate began with transports to the Łódź ghetto in German-occupied Poland. By November 3 of the same year, 5,000 Jews had been deported to the ghetto, and only 277 of them survived.
In November 1941, Heydrich established the Theresienstadt ghetto in the fortress town of Terezín in the protectorate, and the first transport of Czech Jews arrived there 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.
On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was in his convertible Mercedes when he was wounded by the Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. Although Heydrich had an infection and was in great pain, on June 3 he was able to eat his midday meal sitting up. A few hours later he collapsed and died the next day.
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. The Nazi authorities in the protectorate were preparing for that revenge from May 27, 1942, the day Heydrich was mortally wounded.
On that day, Karl Hermann Frank proclaimed a state of emergency and placed a curfew in Prague. Anyone who helped the attackers was to be executed along with their families. A search involving 21,000 men began, and 36,000 houses were checked. By June 4, 157 people had been executed as a result of the reprisals, but the assassins had not been found and no information was forthcoming.
On June 9, the day of Heydrich's state funeral in Berlin, Frank reported from Berlin that the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found to have harbored Heydrich's killers: execute all men, transport all women to a concentration camp, gather the children suitable for Germanization and place them with SS families in the Reich, bring the rest of the children up in other ways, and burn down the village and level it entirely.
One such village became Lidice, which had been named in a love letter found during the first days of the SS and police investigations into the attack on Heydrich. Though there was no real evidence connecting the people of the town with the assassins, the Nazis used even the smallest pretext to take revenge for Heydrich's death and singled out Lidice as the site of retaliation.
Karl Hermann Frank played a key role in the destruction of the village and the execution of its citizens, which were conducted on Hitler's direct order on June 9 and 10, 1942. To avenge Heydrich's death, Frank ordered the shooting of all the men in Lidice, the sending of all the women to concentration camps, and the placement of those children considered worthy of Germanization in the care of SS families. Children not worthy of Germanization were also murdered.
On the morning of June 10, 1942, 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.
Two weeks after the Lidice massacre, the small Czech village of Ležáky was destroyed when Gestapo agents found a radio transmitter there that had belonged to an underground team who had parachuted in with Kubiš and Gabčík. All 33 adults, both men and women, from the village were shot, and the children were sent to concentration camps or Aryanized.
The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge Heydrich's death is estimated at over 1,300 people. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czechs suspected of disloyalty, and random victims like those from Lidice.
In June 1943, Frank was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer, a rank equivalent to lieutenant general. He was also made General of Police in Prague and General of the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, in the protectorate. In August 1943, Frank was made Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia and was granted cabinet rank and status, but without the formal title of Reich Minister. The Czechs named their Nazi Minister of State "Bloody Dog Frank."
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, and 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 Karl Hermann 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 May 9, 1945, Frank was arrested by US Army troops, but his plan did not work out, as he was extradited back to Prague.
From March to May 1946, he was tried by the People's Court. Although no attorney wanted to defend him, he eventually got one named Kamill Resler, who was nicknamed "The Devil's Advocate" for defending Frank. Despite a definite death penalty outcome, Resler proceeded to defend Frank honorably and nobly during the trial.
During the trial, Frank 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 law, as murder. His lies did not help him escape justice.
On Tuesday, May 21, 1946, the People's Court in Prague sentenced Karl Hermann Frank to death by hanging for treason and the massacre of civilians of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Jaroslav Drábek, the prosecutor during the Frank trial, later said that he, who had to watch helplessly as Hitler systematically killed his nation and murdered his dearest friends, gained the power overnight to make those who caused it all pay for their crimes. In Prague as prosecutor, he brought to the gallows Karl Hermann Frank, Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Kurt Daluege, and many other scoundrels, traitors, and murderers.
Even though Karl Hermann Frank had never shown mercy to any of the Czech people, he appealed to Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš for leniency. Frank wrote to Beneš that he believed that as a victor he would show mercy and grant him life. However, there was no reply to his telegraphed appeal.
Frank's 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 in the Pankrác prison in Prague to witness the execution of the most hated man in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
When Karl Hermann Frank was hanged on Wednesday, May 22, 1946, he was 48 years old. At 1:37 p.m., he was lifted up to the top of the pole by a sling and then dropped about a meter, the hangman covering Frank's face with his hand. 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."
Normally a condemned man executed in this way hung on the gallows for half an hour. Frank, however, remained hanging on the rope for 15 minutes longer. Karl Hermann Frank was then buried in an anonymous pit cemetery where the bodies of Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, had secretly been buried in a mass grave.
Frank's family did not fare any better. His second wife, Karola, was arrested, taken to the Soviet Union, and sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment. In the end, she spent 10 years performing forced labor in Kazakhstan's Gulag. She was released in 1955 and moved to West Germany, where it took her four years to find her three children, who had grown up in new families under new names. There were no tears for Karl Hermann Frank.