On October 1, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, after more than ten months of proceedings, 21 defendants described as among the most significant political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany heard their verdicts. These high-ranking figures of the criminal Nazi regime finally had to take responsibility for their crimes before an international military tribunal. It was only the first of many war crimes trials held after World War II, intended as a warning to war criminals and dictators around the world.
After the true scale of German atrocities, committed above all against Jews, was revealed, 12 of the 21 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. One of them was the former ruler of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland, responsible from his position for the exploitation and killing of hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians, as well as for the deportations and murders of Polish Jews. His name was Hans Frank.
Hans Michael Frank, the second of three children, was born on May 23, 1900, in Karlsruhe, then part of the German Empire. His father Karl was a successful lawyer, and his mother Magdalena was the daughter of a prosperous banker. In 1910, when Hans Frank was ten, his mother left the family for a lover in Prague.
World War I began on July 28, 1914. Hans, who grew up in Munich and attended the Maximilian Gymnasium there, joined the German army at 17 but never reached the front. After the war ended on November 11, 1918, and during the German revolution of 1918 and 1919, Frank served in the Freikorps, independent paramilitary units that helped overthrow the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.
The Freikorps recruited mainly veterans returning from World War I, who fought against communists and other groups they blamed 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 legendary northern land from Greek legend. The society is notable mainly because it sponsored the German Workers' Party, which Frank joined in 1919, as did other Thule members.
The German Workers' Party, dissolved in February 1920, was the predecessor of the Nazi Party, whose official name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Frank waited until September 1923 to become a member of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary organization also known as the Brownshirts because of the color of its members' uniforms.
One of the SA's first organized activities was the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 8 and 9, 1923, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, at the head of a coalition group, tried to overthrow the German government. The conspirators hoped a march on Berlin would spark a national revolution, but the uprising failed. Munich police units clashed with Nazi Brownshirts marching into the city center, and in the ensuing gunfire 16 Nazi Party members and four policemen died.
The coup attempt became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Its leaders, including Adolf Hitler, were arrested. Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison, but served only eight months. After the putsch attempt, Frank fled to Italy, where he learned Italian, and returned to Munich only in 1924, after the ongoing legal proceedings were halted.
On April 2, 1925, Hans Frank married Brigitte Herbst, then 29, a stenographer in the Bavarian state parliament and later a secretary at the University of Munich. Brigitte, who often told friends she had to marry before her 30th birthday, grew up in modest circumstances and from an early age sought a higher standard of living. In Hans Frank, five years younger, a fun-loving Bavarian from a wealthy legal family who had just earned his doctorate, she found someone who could fulfill her ambitions.
The marriage was not particularly warm, because Frank could not stand up to his dominant wife. Although Brigitte was not known for great maternal feeling and did not particularly like children, she made Hans Frank the father of five. Between 1927 and 1939, two daughters and three sons were born, including Niklas Frank. Brigitte used their children to control her husband, and when she needed him to do something she would say, "Hans, I bore you five children."
In an interview for World History, Niklas Frank said his mother Brigitte took her driving test in Adolf Hitler's car. She reportedly did not like Hitler because his breath smelled. In 1929, Hitler appointed Hans Frank, who had risen to become his personal legal adviser, head of the Nazi Party's legal department. As the Nazis moved toward power, Frank also served as the party's lawyer, representing it in more than 2,400 cases.
This sometimes brought him into conflict with other lawyers. Once a former teacher appealed to him: "Please leave those people alone, nothing good will come of it. Political movements that begin in criminal courts will also end in criminal courts." One factor that helped the Nazis to power was propaganda. They used it throughout the 1920s and 1930s to bolster Hitler's image, and thanks to this and other factors he became extraordinarily popular.
The Nazi Party's meteoric rise to power began in 1930, when it won 107 seats in the German parliament, the Reichstag, and Hans Frank became one of its members. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933. In April of that year Frank was appointed minister of justice for Bavaria, serving until December 1934, when he was appointed a Reich minister without portfolio in the Reich government.
On June 2, 1933, he was appointed Reichsleiter, the second-highest political rank in the Nazi Party, and in that role was put in charge of legal affairs. On June 26, 1933, Frank founded the Academy of German Law. At its founding session on October 2, 1933, he was named its leader, and in August 1934 his position was renamed president. The academy was to promote reform of German legal life by advancing the National Socialist program in law and economics in cooperation with legislative bodies.
Hans Frank also served as chairman of the academy's commission for the philosophy of law and was editor of several of its publications. In January 1934, Frank was appointed one of three judges of the Supreme Party Court, an internal tribunal established by Adolf Hitler in 1925 to settle intra-party problems and disputes. Hans Frank disagreed with extrajudicial executions, both in the Dachau concentration camp and during the Night of the Long Knives, because in his view they weakened the power of the legal system.
According to Frank's view, a trial required the following: the judge's task is to protect the specific order of the racial community, remove dangerous elements, prosecute all acts harmful to the community, and decide disputes among community members. The basis for interpreting legal sources is Nazi ideology, especially as expressed in the party program and in the speeches of our leader. At a lecture on National Socialist legal policy in Rome in April 1936, Frank met Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, with whom he soon established a cordial relationship, partly because he could speak with him without an interpreter. In late September 1936, Frank traveled to Rome again to convey Hitler's invitation to Mussolini to visit Germany, during which he then served as Mussolini's personal adviser.
On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently annexed territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, homes, and schools and destroyed hundreds of synagogues. Ninety-one Jews were murdered, and German SS and police sent nearly 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps, mostly Dachau.
Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the transition from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to violent and aggressive anti-Jewish measures that culminated in the Holocaust. Many Jews realized they had to leave Germany. Brigitte Frank never helped any of them, even though she had been in contact with them before the Nazis came to power through the fur trade. One of these Jews later saw her with two friends while standing in a long line for a visa. He asked her, "Do you remember me? I need a visa for my family." She turned away and did nothing.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland. Poland found itself at war on two fronts when it was attacked by the Soviet Union from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and a day later Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland in accordance with a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact.
They split Poland into thirds: the western third was annexed to Germany, the eastern third to the Soviet Union, and the middle third was turned into a separate administrative unit called the General Government. Hans Frank was appointed governor-general by Adolf Hitler himself, who knew Frank would not make trouble. When Hans Frank personally received the order from Hitler to take over the administration of occupied Poland, he returned from the Führer to his wife in their Berlin villa, immediately knelt before her, and said, "Brigitte, you will become the queen of Poland."
Frank described the policy he intended to pursue this way: Poland would be treated as a colony, and Poles would become slaves of the Greater German world empire. He was the most important administrative official in the region, but at the same time he could not rule as he pleased, because the SS and police were responsible for implementing racial policy in the General Government. Frank did not oppose these goals, but he hated it when others interfered in his domain.
When the SS was building its first concentration camp, Hans Frank asked Himmler, the head of the SS, what was going on there. Himmler replied, "That is none of your business." Hitler wanted the General Government to serve as a racial dumping ground, an endless source of slave labor, and a site of mass extermination of European Jews. The General Government had a total of 12 million inhabitants, of whom 1.5 million were Jews. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they annexed Eastern Galicia to the General Government, increasing the population by 3 to 4 million.
The Germans treated Poles in the General Government terribly, regarding them as cheap labor to be used at any time. All resistance was suppressed with the greatest cruelty. A reign of terror was introduced, supported by summary police courts that ordered actions such as the public shooting of groups of 20 to 200 Poles and widespread shooting of hostages. The scale of this terror was indicated by Frank in 1940 with a cynical comment to a newspaper reporter.
Commenting on a poster by Konstantin von Neurath announcing the execution of Czech students, he said: "In Prague, large red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, if I had to put up one poster for every seven Poles shot, the Polish forests would not be enough to produce the paper." For his horrific treatment of Poles, Hans Frank became known as the "Butcher of Poland."
In addition, the economic demands placed on the General Government greatly exceeded the needs of the occupying army and were wholly disproportionate to the country's resources. Food produced in Poland was delivered to Germany on such a scale that rations for the population in the occupied territories were reduced to starvation levels, and diseases spread epidemically. Very harsh regulations applied to the Jews of the General Government, and from the very beginning the Germans confiscated their property and forced them into labor.
From the end of 1939, Jews were placed in ghettos, where they were completely isolated from the outside world and strictly restricted. Speaking to his associates on November 25, 1939, Frank said openly that it was a joy for him finally to be able to approach the Jewish race physically. He even said that the more of them died, the better. On October 16, 1940, Hans Frank announced the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, which became the largest of all Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
The ghetto's population, swollen by Jews forced to move in from surrounding towns, was estimated at more than 400,000. German authorities forced its inhabitants to live in an area of 3.4 square kilometers, with an average of 7.2 people per room. Proper hygiene was nearly impossible, as many buildings had no running water. Extreme overcrowding, minimal food rations, and unhygienic conditions led to disease, starvation, and the deaths of thousands of Jews every month.
The average daily food ration for Warsaw Jews in 1941 was limited to 184 calories, while for Germans it was 2,613 calories. An official German order stated that the basic supply of the Jewish residential quarter must be lower than the minimum necessary to sustain life, regardless of the consequences. Hunger in the ghetto was so great that dying people lay in the streets and small children begged. From 1940 to mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. When a resident of the Warsaw Ghetto died, his family placed the body in the street, and in the morning it was collected by a hearse that drove through the ghetto every day.
On December 16, 1941, Hans Frank described the coming extermination of Jews to his senior officials: "The Jews are also exceptionally harmful gluttons for us. I have initiated negotiations for the deportation of the Jews to the east. In January a major conference on this question will take place in Berlin. In any case, the great resettlement of the Jews will begin. But what should we do with the Jews? Do you think they will be housed on estates in the Ostland, in villages? In Berlin we were told: why so much worry, we can't do anything with them either in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat, so liquidate them yourselves, gentlemen. I must ask you to get rid of all feelings of pity. We must exterminate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever possible." And they did.
In the spring of 1942, the Germans began deporting Jews from the ghettos to extermination camps in the Lublin district, and by 1944 all the ghettos in the General Government had been liquidated. While millions of Poles died of hunger or were murdered in German extermination and concentration camps, the Frank family grew accustomed to a lavish lifestyle with good food, large houses, and plenty of money. Hans Frank ruled Poland like a king, and his wife Brigitte often called herself the queen of Poland.
From November 1939, Hans Frank resided at Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków, the ancestral seat of Polish kings. He had Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine," one of only three surviving Da Vinci oil paintings in the world, sent there to hang in his study. The General Government was soon jokingly called "Frank Reich" 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 artistically inclined and musical, played the piano, was an opera lover, played chess, and socialized with artists such as the German composer Richard Strauss, who even wrote a hymn to Hans Frank. Kressendorf Castle, which served as the Frank family's private weekend residence, was furnished with furniture stolen from Polish aristocratic castles. Hans Frank's son Niklas, in an interview for World History, recalled how his mother fired all the pretty maids because she was afraid her unfaithful husband Hans would seduce them all, since he cared little about whom he slept with.
Niklas also said that Jews were never discussed at home, but he recalled that there was a railway near their weekend house and that all the trains full of Jews deported to Auschwitz passed by Kressendorf Castle. Niklas also remembered how his father's sister made several trips to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp and told incoming Jews that she would help them survive if they gave her diamonds, but she never helped anyone. Frank's wife Brigitte also took advantage of the German terror.
She drove to the Kraków and Warsaw ghettos in her open Mercedes-Benz with a driver to obtain jewelry, furs, and other valuables. In 1942, Hans Frank, a notorious womanizer, met Lily Groh, his childhood love, for whom he intended to leave his wife. He wanted to marry Lily. Brigitte Frank, however, did not want to give up her position and even declared, "I would rather be the widow than the ex-wife of a Reich minister."
Brigitte, the self-styled queen of Poland, also had many extramarital relationships and underwent several abortions because she was unsure who the father of the child was. To get rid of Groh, she not only described her husband's mistress to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as a Jew, but also intervened with Hitler. Hitler told Frank that he could divorce Brigitte only if he resigned from his office, which never happened. Hans Frank later claimed that he had submitted his resignation to Hitler 14 times, but Hitler never accepted it. The truth was that he never wanted to give up his power.
In 1942, Frank became temporarily embroiled in a dispute with Himmler over the type of legal system that should apply in Germany, and he angered Hitler with a series of speeches at universities in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich. In them he criticized the police state and demanded an independent judiciary. Hitler then banned Frank from appearing outside the General Government and removed him both from the position of Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party and from the presidency of the Academy of German Law.
In January 1944, an explosive device derailed a special train to Lviv in which Frank was traveling. No one was killed, but about 100 Polish hostages from the Montelupich prison in Kraków were executed as punishment. The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, when the Polish Home Army, a non-communist resistance army whose units were deployed throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities and tried to liberate Warsaw.
The uprising was prompted by the arrival of Soviet troops on the eastern bank of the Vistula, but the Soviets did not intervene. During the uprising, 166,000 people died, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who either fought in the ranks of the Polish Home Army or were discovered in hiding. On October 16, 1944, Hans Frank held a dinner at Wawel Royal Castle in honor of Oskar Dirlewanger, a Nazi officer and pedophile.
Dirlewanger led his 4,000 butchers, rapists, and looters into action against the Warsaw Uprising and in a short time committed such unspeakable crimes that army and SS commanders demanded the unit's withdrawal. Frank expressed gratitude and recognition for the exemplary operations his group carried out during the fighting in Warsaw. On January 17, 1945, as the Red Army advanced, Hans Frank fled Kraków, accompanied by three trucks full of artworks, including paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, and Da Vinci.
He also had a false passport in the name of Fischer so that, with the help of the Catholic Church, he could leave for Argentina. In the end, however, Frank did not leave Germany, because he did not believe he would be tried after the war before a military tribunal. He thought that at worst he and other Nazis would be sent to the Netherlands, as had happened in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II after World War I, and would enjoy the property stolen during the war years.
When later asked about the stolen art treasures, he replied: "The accusation that touches my private life and affects me most deeply is that I was supposed to have enriched myself with the art treasures of the country entrusted to me. I did not collect paintings and during the war I had no time to acquire paintings. I made sure that all the art treasures of the country entrusted to me were officially registered." Three trucks full of artworks with which he fled Kraków evidently did not fall into that category.
On May 4, 1945, Frank was captured by American soldiers near Lake Tegernsee in southern Bavaria. He was arrested by the same soldiers who five days earlier had liberated Dachau and had been direct witnesses to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Frank then had to pass through a gauntlet of American soldiers who all beat him. Under such pressure Frank collapsed, could not bear the thought of even crueler treatment, and attempted suicide.
When that attempt failed, he tried again just 48 hours later and unsuccessfully cut his left wrist. He later said, "I attempted suicide because I sacrificed everything to Hitler, and the man for whom we sacrificed everything left us in the lurch." As his son Niklas said, his father attempted suicide because he did not want to be treated like the others. Brigitte Frank also faced a difficult period. All their friends were gone and no one wanted to have anything to do with them.
To buy food she had to sell all their property, including jewelry stolen from murdered Jews and paintings taken from Kraków. What remained was confiscated. She still hoped her husband would be released and even planned another child with him. Instead, Hans Frank was tried in the Nuremberg trials, conducted against the leaders of defeated Nazi Germany. He faced three charges: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
At the beginning of his testimony, Frank stated that he felt a terrible guilt for the atrocities committed in the occupied territories. His defense, however, was largely devoted to trying to prove that he was not actually responsible, that he had ordered only necessary measures to calm the situation, that the excesses were caused by the actions of the police, which was not under his control, and that he had not even known about the activities of the concentration camps. As Niklas Frank confirmed, his parents knew everything about the extermination camps.
During the Nuremberg trials, Brigitte Frank visited several times the Jewish journalist Gaston Oulman, who wrote an article every day about the proceedings. Sometimes he brought chocolate to the Frank children, and Brigitte mentioned Oulman in a letter to her husband: "He is a Jew, but I think he has a human heart." During the trial, Hans Frank converted to the Catholic faith and claimed to have had a number of religious experiences.
He also accused the Allies, especially the Soviets, of their own war atrocities. He and Albert Speer were the only defendants to show some degree of remorse for their crimes. He also said: "I myself, speaking from the depths of my feelings and experiencing this trial, want to say that now, after I have fully seen all those terrible atrocities that were committed, I am overcome with a feeling of guilt. Those of us who are guilty must pay for it." And so 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 voluntarily and knowingly participated in terrorism in Poland, in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that led to the starvation deaths of a large number of people, in the deportation of more than a million Poles to Germany as slave laborers, and in the program of extermination of at least 3 million Jews.
After the death sentence was pronounced, Frank declared: "Death by hanging, I deserved it and I expected it." Frank was executed by U.S. Army Sergeant John C. Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as an executioner. It is believed that he did his work deliberately badly so that the 10 Nazi war criminals he executed that day would suffer, because they all died long, agonizing deaths.
The Nazis executed by the sergeant dropped from the gallows with a fall that was not enough to break the neck, leading to death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. In addition, the trapdoor was too small, so several of the condemned suffered bleeding head injuries during the fall. Hans Frank was the fifth of the Nuremberg defendants to reach the gallows on the day of his execution, October 16, 1946.
As the only one of the condemned, he entered the execution room with a smile on his face. He spoke his last words: "I am grateful for the way I was treated during my captivity, and I ask God to receive me mercifully." He was then hanged. Because the rope did not break his neck, terrible convulsions of his body lasted a long 11 minutes before he died. He was 46 years old. His body was afterward cremated and the ashes scattered in the river Isar.
Sergeant Woods later not only insisted that he had carried out all the executions correctly, but also declared that he was very proud of his work. Hans Frank's wife Brigitte never spoke positively about the Third Reich after the war and died on March 9, 1959, on her son Niklas's 20th birthday. The Frank children dealt with the family's Nazi past very differently.
When Niklas wrote a book about his father in 1987 titled "My Father: A Reckoning," in which he condemned his father and questioned his remorse before execution, one of his brothers accused him of lying. Hans Frank's daughter Sigrid moved to southern Africa because she liked apartheid. The second daughter, Brigitte, 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. No tears were shed for Hans Frank.