Hans Frank (May 23, 1900 – October 16, 1946) was a lawyer for the Nazi party during the 1920s and a senior official in Nazi Germany. Because of his tenure as Governor-General of occupied Poland, he was prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials for his role in perpetrating the Holocaust, found guilty of complicity in the murder of millions of Poles and Polish Jews, and executed on October 16 1946.

Frank was born in Karlsruhe and joined the German army in 1917. He served in the Freikorps and joined the German Labour Party in 1919, becoming a member of NSDAP proper in 1927. He studied law, passing the final state examination in 1926, and rose to become the personal legal advisor to Hitler. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1930, and in 1933 he was made Minister of Justice for Bavaria. He was also the head of the National Socialist Jurists Association and President of the Academy of German Law from 1933. Frank objected to extra-judicial killings, both at Dachau and during the Night of the Long Knives. From 1934 he was Reich Minister Without Portfolio.

In September 1939 Frank was assigned as Chief of Administration to Gerd von Rundstedt in the General Government. From October 26, 1939, following the division of Poland, Frank was the Governor-General of the General Government for the occupied Polish territories (Generalgouverneur für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete), that is head of the General Government controlling those areas of Poland that had not been directly incorporated into Germany (roughly 90,000 km² out of the 170,000 km² Germany had gained). He was granted the SS rank of Obergruppenführer.

Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews into ghettos (Jewish quarters) and the use of Polish civilians as "forced and compulsory" labour. In 1942 he lost his positions of authority outside of the General Government after annoying Hitler with a series of speeches in Berlin, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich and also as part of a power struggle with Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the State Secretary for Security—head of the SS and the police in the General Government. But it was Krüger who was ultimately replaced, with Wilhelm Koppe. Frank later claimed that the extermination of Jews was entirely controlled by Heinrich Himmler and the SS and that he, Frank, was unaware of the extermination camps in the General Government until early in 1944. During his testimony at Nuremberg, Frank claimed he submitted resignation requests to Hitler on fourteen occasions but Hitler would not allow him to resign. Frank fled the General Government in January 1945, in advance of the Soviet Army.

Capture and Trial

Frank was captured by American troops on May 4, 1945, near Berchtesgaden and was one of the defendants in the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. During the trial he renewed his childhood practice of Catholicism and, under the pressure of being on trial for his life, claimed to have a series of religious experiences.

Frank voluntarily surrendered over forty volumes of his personal diaries to the Allies, which were then used against him as evidence of his guilt. Frank confessed to some of the charges put against him and viewed his own execution as a form of atonement for his sins. On the witness stand he, converted to Catholicism in the meanwhile, uttered: "A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will still not have been erased." However, during the trial, he vacillated wildly between penitence for his crimes and blaming the Allies, especially the Soviets, for an equal share of wartime atrocities.

He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging. Journalist Howard K. Smith wrote of his execution:

Quote

Fiction and film

Featured in Robert Harris's novel Fatherland.

External links

• Testimony of Frank at Nuremberg
• Hans Frank

Nazi leaders | Executed Nazi leaders | Nuremberg executions | People convicted in the Nuremberg Trials | German World War II people | Anti-Polonism | People executed by hanging | Natives of Baden-Württemberg | 1900 births | 1946 deaths

Ханс Франк | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | הנס פרנק | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | ფრანკი, ჰანს | Hans Frank | ハンス・フランク | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Hans Frank | Франк Ганс