NUREMBERG, Germany — The man who ruled occupied Poland with an iron fist and a genocidal fury met his end on the gallows this morning, his body convulsing for eleven agonizing minutes before death finally silenced the man known throughout the world as “The Butcher of Poland.”
Hans Frank, the 46-year-old former Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland, was the fifth of ten war criminals to be executed at Nuremberg Prison following the conclusion of the International Military Tribunal. In a final act that mirrored the cruelty he inflicted upon millions, Frank’s execution was botched by the hangman, resulting in a slow, painful strangulation rather than the instantaneous death intended by the drop.
Witnesses reported that Frank entered the execution chamber with a smile on his face, a stark contrast to the terror and defiance shown by other condemned Nazis. His last words were a quiet statement of gratitude for his treatment in captivity and a plea for divine mercy. But the mercy he sought from God was not granted by the mechanics of the gallows.
The trapdoor opened, and Frank fell, but the drop was insufficient to snap his neck. For eleven long minutes, the former lawyer and intimate of Adolf Hitler strangled at the end of the rope, his body twisting and convulsing in a grotesque spectacle that served as a final, brutal reckoning for the unspeakable horrors he orchestrated.
The execution was carried out by Master Sergeant John C. Woods, an American army hangman whose lack of pre-war experience has become a point of grim controversy. Woods, who insisted he was “very proud” of his work, used a method that resulted in the slow death of all ten men executed that day.
The trapdoor was too small, and the drops were too short, causing several of the condemned, including Frank, to suffer bleeding head injuries and prolonged strangulation. For the man who once cynically remarked that the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper needed to post the execution notices for the Poles he had killed, the manner of his death was a poetic, if horrifying, form of justice.
Frank’s journey to the scaffold was a long and bloody one, marked by a transformation from a promising young lawyer into one of the most hated men in Europe. Born in Karlsruhe in 1900 to a successful lawyer and a banker’s daughter, Frank’s early life was disrupted when his mother abandoned the family for a lover in Prague in 1910. He joined the German Army at 17 during the First World War, and in the chaotic aftermath, he served in the Freikorps, the paramilitary units that brutally suppressed the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
It was during this time that he became a member of the Thule Society, an occultist group that sponsored the German Workers’ Party, the precursor to the Nazi Party.
Frank joined the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, in 1923, just before the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. After the coup attempt, he fled to Italy, returning to Munich in 1924 after legal proceedings were stayed. By 1929, he had become Hitler’s personal legal advisor and head of the Nazi Party’s legal department, representing the party in over 2,400 cases.
His rise was meteoric. In 1933, he was appointed Minister of Justice for Bavaria, and by 1934, he was a Reich Minister and a judge on the Supreme Party Court. He founded the Academy for German Law and was a key figure in reshaping the German legal system to fit Nazi ideology, arguing that the judge’s role was to “safeguard the concrete order of the racial community.”
Despite his objections to extrajudicial killings, which he felt weakened the power of the legal system, Frank’s ambition and loyalty to Hitler never wavered. When the Second World War began with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the country was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler appointed Frank as Governor General of the central portion of Poland, known as the General Government. It was a position that would seal his legacy as a mass murderer.
Frank described his new domain with chilling clarity: “Poland shall be treated like a colony. The Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German World Empire.” He returned from receiving his orders from Hitler and knelt before his wife, Brigitta, declaring, “Brigitta, you will become the Queen of Poland.”
And he ruled like a king, residing in Krakow’s Wawel Castle, the ancestral seat of Polish kings, where he hung Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” in his office. He lived a lavish lifestyle, surrounded by stolen art and furniture, while the 12 million people under his rule were subjected to a reign of terror.
The Poles were treated as a cheap labor source, and all opposition was crushed with utmost harshness. Summary police courts ordered public shootings of groups of 20 to 200 Poles, and hostages were executed en masse. Frank himself boasted of the scale of the terror, comparing the execution notices in Prague to what he would have needed in Poland: “If I had put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper.”
It was this brutal treatment that earned him the moniker “The Butcher of Poland.”
But it was the treatment of the Jews that would define Frank’s legacy of evil. From the beginning of his rule, he confiscated their property and forced them into labor. In a speech to his staff on November 25, 1939, he openly described it as “a joy to finally be able to physically approach the Jewish race.
The more that die the better.” In October 1940, he announced the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest in Nazi-occupied Europe, confining over 400,000 Jews into an area of 1. 3 square miles.
With an average of 7. 2 people per room, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions, disease and starvation were rampant. The official daily food ration for Jews was limited to 184 calories, compared to 2,613 for Germans.
Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease in the ghetto alone.
Frank was not just a passive observer; he was a driving force behind the genocide. On December 16, 1941, he addressed his senior officials about the approaching annihilation of the Jews. “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible,” he declared.
“Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity.” The deportation of Jews from the ghettos to extermination camps began in the spring of 1942, and by 1944, all ghettos in the General Government had been liquidated, with at least three million Jews murdered.
While millions perished, the Frank family lived in opulence. His wife, Brigitta, a self-proclaimed “Queen of Poland,” drove to the ghettos in her open Mercedes-Benz to procure jewelry and furs from the condemned. She had a Jewish journalist visit her during the Nuremberg trials, writing to her husband that “he is a Jew but I think he has a human heart.”
Frank himself was a notorious womanizer, and his wife, fearing divorce, had several abortions and even described his mistress as a Jew to Himmler. The family’s depravity was a microcosm of the regime’s corruption, as they enriched themselves with the stolen possessions of the murdered.
As the Soviet Army advanced in January 1945, Frank fled Krakow with three trucks full of looted art, including paintings by Rembrandt and Raphael, and a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 passport to escape to Argentina. He was captured by American troops on May 4, 1945, in southern Bavaria. The soldiers who arrested him had liberated Dachau just days earlier and beat him mercilessly.
Crumbling under the pressure, Frank attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists, but failed. He later said, “I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. The man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone.”
At Nuremberg, Frank faced charges of conspiracy, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He initially expressed a “terrible guilt” for the atrocities but attempted to deflect responsibility, claiming he was not in control of the SS and police and knew nothing of the concentration camps. However, his son Nicholas later confirmed that his parents knew everything about the extermination camps.
During the trial, Frank converted to Roman Catholicism and was one of only two defendants to show remorse. In his final statement, he said, “I am possessed by a deep sense of guilt. Those of us who are guilty must pay the price.”
He did. The Tribunal found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to death by hanging. Upon hearing the sentence, Frank said, “Death by hanging I deserve it and I expected it.”
His final moments were a testament to the brutality he had championed. As he hung, convulsing for eleven minutes, the world witnessed the end of a man who had once said, “The Jews are exceptionally harmful feeders for us.” There were no tears shed for Hans Frank.
His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the River Isar, a final, ignoble end for a man who sought to be the king of Poland but will forever be remembered as its butcher.