Hans Frank (1900-1946): one of history’s most murderous lawyers. As an enthusiastic early Nazi, he took part in the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Armed with a law degree, he boasted the role of Hitler’s personal attorney, as well as general counsel for the Nazi Party. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Hitler rewarded Frank’s loyalty by making him a Reich Minister without portfolio. He also made him President of the Reichstag – Germany’s parliament. Hans’ true career as a monster emerged during WWII, when Hitler made him Governor-General of newly-conquered Poland.
An avid proponent of Nazi racist ideology, Frank set out to stamp out Polish identity. He also wanted to let the conquered Poles know that they existed merely to serve. Mainly, as de facto Helots for the Aryan ‘Master Race’. To that end, Frank ordered the execution of hundreds of thousands of Poles. He also engineered the wholesale confiscation of Polish property. He ordered the rounding up of hundreds of thousands Polish workers. They shipped them to Germany to toil as slave laborers. Even that paled in comparison to his most atrocious actions, all directed at Poland’s Jews.
As ruler of rump Poland, Hans Frank instituted a reign of terror, featuring the segregation of Jews into ghettos. Then their wholesale extermination. It did not matter that he fathered five children. Frank reconciled affection towards his own kids with coldhearted indifference towards the murder of thousands of other people’s children. In December of 1941, he instructed his subordinates.
“Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible”.
Under Frank, the mass murder of Jews morphed from ad hoc massacres to deliberate policy. Of the Holocaust’s six extermination camps, four were located in Frank’s General Government. After the war, he tried to pretend he knew nothing about the millions of Jews killed in his territory. But documentary evidence exposed the lie in that claim. Captured by US troops in the war’s closing days, he faced trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Convicted, sentenced to death, he hanged on October 16, 1946.
Hans Frank at the dock in Nuremberg. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
