Background
Hans Frank was born in Karlsruhe on 23 May 1900, the son of a barrister who had been struck off the list for corruption.
Hans Frank was born in Karlsruhe on 23 May 1900, the son of a barrister who had been struck off the list for corruption.
He graduated from high school at the renowned Maximilians gymnasium in Munich, and right after, at seventeen, joined the German army fighting in World War I, barely reaching front line combat.
After a brief spell in the Fretkorps, Frank joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and then in September 1923 became a storm trooper. In November of the same year he participated in the march on the Felderrnhalle.
In 1926 he passed the State bar examinations and began to practise as a lawyer in Munich. In the years before 1933 he defended Hitler in several hundred actions, emerging as the star defence counsel of the NSDAP and head of its legal office in 1929. Already Hitler's personal lawyer, Frank was rewarded with a series of high offices following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
Bavarian Minister of Justice, Reich Leader of the NSDAP (head of the Party law division), Reich Minister of Justice, President of the Academy of German Law' as well as the International Chamber of Law, Hans Frank became Reich Minister without Portfolio in 1934.
In spite of these imposing titles, Frank never belonged to Hitler's innermost circle of power, perhaps because of his profession - Hitler detested and despised lawyers - and his middle-class origins. Moreover, the fact that he had raised formal objections at the time of Rohm’s murder in 1934, led to a gradual decline in his political influence. Frank’s dreams of resurrecting German popular law, his misunderstanding of the relations between Nazi praxis and the Party programme, and his vacillating, insecure personality compounded of romantic idealism and a nihilistic admiration for self-confident brutality, prevented him from playing a front-rank role.
Nevertheless, following the conquest of Poland, Frank was appointed Governor-General and made responsible for civil administration in the ‘vandal Gau as he called it.
Frank complained that the extermination policy which he approved in principle divested him of valuable labour-power and he found himself at loggerheads with the SS and police authorities in Poland - especially SS-Obergruppen- führer Kruger - who were eroding his jurisdiction on all sides. In spite of his own brutal inhumanity, Frank never really grasped the anti-utilitarian aspects of the Nazi genocide policy nor the nature of the system he loyally served.
In July 1942 following the execution of his friend Dr Carl Lasch (First President of the German Law Academy) on embezzlement charges, Frank in a lecture tour of German universities called for a return to constitutional rule. Within a month he was stripped of all his Party honours and legal offices, being replaced as Reichskommissar of Justice by Otto Thierack though he remained as Governor-General of Poland, a post that Hitler regarded as the most unpleasant he could give anyone. After the fall of the Third Reich, the ‘slayer of Poles' and exterminator of Jews was brought to trial at Nuremberg, abjectly confessing his guilt, pleading contrition and declaring that‘. . . a thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased'. By this time Frank had become reconciled to the Catholic church and even attacked Hitler as a betrayer of millions of Germans. He was executed as a war criminal in Nuremberg prison on 16 October 1946.
Frank treated the Poles as slaves of the Greater German Reich, to be mercilessly subordinated, exploited and wiped out as a national entity. The cream of Poland’s intelligentsia were exterminated, the country’s art treasures were ransacked for private gain and, while the Poles starved, Frank set up tables in extravagant luxury ruling his vassal kingdom from the old royal palace in Cracow, if I put up a poster for every seven Poles shot,' he boasted to a Nazi newspaper correspondent, ‘the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper for such posters.’
Frank's policy towards Jews was even more brutal. In a notorious speech on 16 December 1941, Frank declared: i ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear. They will have to go. . . . We must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them and whenever opportunity offers so that we can maintain the whole structure of the Reich here. . . . We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, and we can't poison them, but we can take steps which, one way or another, will lead to extermination, in conjunction with the large-scale measures under discussion in the Reich.’ Subsequently,
On 2 April 1925 Frank married 29-year-old secretary Brigitte Herbst (25 December 1895 – 9 March 1959) from Forst (Lausitz). The wedding took place in Munich and the couple honeymooned in Venetia. Hans and Brigitte Frank had five children:
Sigrid Frank (born 13 March 1927, Munich – d. in South Africa)
Norman Frank (born 3 June 1928, Munich – d. 2010)
Brigitte Frank (born 13 January 1935, Munich – d. 1981)
Michael Frank (born 15 February 1937, Munich – d. 1990)
Niklas Frank (born 9 March 1939, Munich)