Hans Frank

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Hans Frank (1939)

Hans Michael Frank (born May 23, 1900 in Karlsruhe , † October 16, 1946 in Nuremberg ) was a National Socialist German politician . He joined the DAP , a forerunner of the NSDAP , as early as 1919, acted as Adolf Hitler's lawyer and, as Reich legal leader , was the highest lawyer in the “ Third Reich ”. After 1933 he organized the synchronization of the judiciary in Bavaria and later throughout Germany. He was a member of the Reichstag and Reich Minister without portfolio. During the Second World War , Frank became Governor General of the unannexed remainder of the former Polish state . He was also called the "butcher of Poland" by his victims. His State Secretary Josef Bühler represented Frank at the Wannsee Conference and there demanded the priority of deporting Jews from the “General Government”.

Hans Frank was one of the 24 defendants in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal . He was speaking on October 1, 1946 in two of three counts of guilty, sentenced to death and at night from 15 to 16 October 1946 the train executed.

Life

Youth and Studies

Hans Michael Frank was born in Karlsruhe as the son of the lawyer Karl Frank (1869–1945) from Edenkoben and his wife Magdalena (née Buchmaier). He had two siblings, Karl junior (1891–1916) and Elisabeth. Frank grew up in Munich from 1901, interrupted by a five-year period from 1903 to 1908, which he spent in Rotthalmünster . After his mother left the family in 1908, he stayed with his father. After graduating from the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich in 1918 , he was drafted into the infantry , but was no longer sent to the front.

After the end of the First World War he joined the " Freikorps Epp " led by Franz Ritter von Epp , which played a major role in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic . Frank joined the völkisch-nationalist Thule Society in Munich , where he met Anton Drexler , the chairman of the German Workers' Party (DAP). In 1919 he became a member of the DAP.

From 1919 to 1923 Frank studied law and economics, from 1919/20 to the summer semester 1921 at the University of Munich , 1921/22 at the University of Kiel and from the winter semester 1922/23 back in Munich. On July 21, 1923 he passed the final exam there. In Munich he studied a. a. with Wilhelm Kisch . With the dissertation The public legal entity. A contribution to the teaching of the characteristic of public legal personality , he received his doctorate in Kiel in 1924 , Walter Jellinek was the speaker . The imprimatur was granted on September 19, 1924.

In September 1923 he was accepted into the SA , and a month later Frank joined the NSDAP. Together with Hitler and his supporters, Frank took part in the march to the Feldherrnhalle ( Hitler putsch ) in Munich on November 9, 1923 , making him one of the small group of old fighters . After the coup failed, Frank fled to Italy, but was able to return to Munich in 1924 after the proceedings pending against him because of the November events were discontinued.

On April 2, 1925, Frank married Maria Brigitte Herbst (born December 29, 1895 - † March 9, 1959) in Munich, who came from Eitorf and grew up in Forst (Lausitz) , and who was secretary in the Bavarian state parliament . The marriage had five children: two daughters and three sons, including Niklas Frank . The family lived on a farm in the Bavarian town of Neuhaus am Schliersee , the "Schoberhof" which Frank bought in 1936.

Legal career

In 1926 Frank passed the state examination. In 1927, according to Gerhard Schulz's 1961 article in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, he received an “assistant position at the legal seminar at the Technical University of Munich”. According to the biographical information in the Reichtag Handbuch of 1932, Hans Frank was more precisely "Member of the faculty of the Technical University, economics department". The economics department was created in 1922 through the integration of the "Handelshochschule München" into the TH.

In the NSDAP he became second assessor of the investigation and arbitration committee of the NSDAP Reichsleitung in 1927 . Frank joined his father's law firm in Munich, which he later took over, and defended Nazi thugs and NSDAP officials in the Weimar Republic .

In 1926 Frank temporarily resigned from the NSDAP. He justified this step with differences with the party leadership regarding their South Tyrol policy, but returned to the party a year later (membership number 40.079 on September 2nd). In 1928 he founded the National Socialist German Lawyers' Association (from 1936 NS-Rechtsswahrerbund), the first specialist organization of the NSDAP, which he also chaired. By 1933 he appeared in over 2,400 proceedings as a legal representative in Nazi matters in court. In 1929 Hitler appointed him head of the legal department of the NSDAP (from 1935 Reichsrechtsamt der NSDAP).

As legal counsel, Frank assisted Hitler with his testimony in the Ulm Reichswehr trial in Leipzig. In this process, Hitler swore in a propaganda action on September 25, 1930 that he only wanted to achieve power in the state legally . Frank was Hitler's lawyer in 40 other trials. In 1931 Frank was given the task of refuting claims about Hitler's Jewish ancestry. As a result, he became an intimate expert on Hitler's ancestry and was possibly the only one who saw all the relevant documents, some of which later disappeared. In the memoirs Frank wrote shortly before his execution, Frank claimed that Maria Schicklgruber , the mother of Hitler's illegitimate father, Alois Hitler , was employed as a cook in the household of a Jewish family named Frankenberger. Frank did not want to completely rule out that Hitler's grandfather could have been Jewish, but he also wrote: “That Adolf Hitler certainly had no Jewish blood in his veins seems to me so blatantly proven from his whole manner that no further word is needed. “The Frankenberger thesis , according to which Hitler might have been a“ quarter Jew ”, caused a sensation, but has since been disproved.

In 1930 Frank was elected a member of the Reichstag. After the National Socialists came to power , he became Minister of Justice of Bavaria in March 1933 and held this office until December 1934. During his tenure in June 1934, the SA was ousted by the murder of Ernst Röhm and numerous SA leaders. Previously, the rumor had been spread that Röhm had putsch plans and a " Röhm putsch " was imminent. Frank later claimed that he protested against the execution of Röhm and the SA leadership, which took place without trial, but this turned out to be a lie. Frank nevertheless spoke out repeatedly against killings without a formal legal basis.

On March 8, 1933, Frank sent in a speech on Bavarian radio "a greeting to his oppressed people in Austria" and threatened that the NSDAP would "take over the safeguarding of the freedom of the German people in Austria if necessary". The Austrian government officially protested in Berlin, but Hitler declined responsibility for Frank's words. In May 1933, Frank, accompanied by the Prussian Minister of Justice Hanns Kerrl and the Deputy Minister Roland Freisler, went to Vienna to carry out National Socialist propaganda . The Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss declared the presence of National Socialist ministers in Austria undesirable and expelled Frank. In response, Hitler imposed the thousand- mark ban in order to weaken the Austrian economy , which was heavily dependent on tourism , and the Austrian National Socialists launched a wave of terrorist attacks - this ultimately led to the NSDAP being banned in Austria on June 19, 1933 .

On April 25, 1933, in the course of bringing lawyers into line, Frank was appointed " Reich Commissioner for the Harmonization of the Judiciary and for the Renewal of the Legal System" by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg , with the aim of bringing the legal authorities into line as well as the professional organizations. Frank's goal was to bring together all members of the legal status in a large coercive organization, to train them in a National Socialist manner and to enforce the NSDAP's claim to totality in legal policy.

In June 1933 Frank therefore founded the " Academy for German Law ", of which he was the sole responsible president and which offered him an important platform for his self-affirmation. Political celebrities such as Goering , Goebbels and Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick as well as Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg were appointed members; Large industrialists such as Carl Bosch , Wilhelm von Opel and Fritz Thyssen supported her . The seat was a patrician house on Leipziger Platz in Berlin, which Frank not only had luxurious furnishings, but also had Hitler's own picture in every study. In Munich, Frank also built a "House of German Law" in Ludwigstrasse from 1936 to 1939, which later became the seat of the Academy and which Hitler allegedly referred to as an "opposition booth". Frank's ambition to transfer “suggestion, assessment, preparation and drafting of draft laws” to the academy, however, called on the Reich Minister of Justice, who prevented this by a decree. Of the many committees of the Academy for German Law, Hans Frank personally headed the Committee on Legal Philosophy , about its importance for the Nuremberg Laws and the Holocaust an international debate among scholars was held, because u. a. the philosopher of being Martin Heidegger was a member.

Frank accumulated further offices as Reichsrechtsführer , Reichsleiter of the Legal Office of the NSDAP as well as other office dignities in various party branches and distinguished himself as the editor of numerous legal writings and periodicals (see section Literature). In December 1934 he joined the government as Reich Minister without portfolio and commuted between his service villas in Berlin and Munich and the family seat in Bavaria.

In 1936 the "Guiding principles on the position and tasks of the judge" were published, in which Frank raised the requirement that the judge should be bound by the will of the leader :

"It's not his job, one above the national community standing legal system to help apply or general values enforce, but he has to respect the specific ethnic community order to eradicate pests to penalize Community misconduct and to settle disputes among community members."

During a lecture on National Socialist legal policy in Rome in April 1936, Frank met Benito Mussolini , with whom he was soon connected to a cordial relationship, not least because he was able to talk to him without an interpreter. At the end of September 1936 Frank traveled again to Rome to bring Mussolini to Hitler's invitation to visit Germany. During this visit, Frank was Mussolini's personal advisor and accompanied Hitler on the return visit to Rome in May 1938. Frank's planned posting as German ambassador to Rome did not materialize.

On May 16, 1936, Frank declared that the separation of powers had been abolished in Germany and that the only power in the state lay with Hitler. After the "Anschluss" of Austria in March 1938, President Frank incorporated the Society for Law and Political Science into the Academy for German Law on June 1, thereby expanding its work to the " Ostmark ".

On September 24, 1939, the National Socialist chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg noted in his diary that Hans Frank's future civil servants were to be trained in the school affiliated with the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP . He wrote: “Frank, the coming civilian commissioner for Poland, has asked me to prepare all his officers in 4-weekly courses in the Foreign Pole [Italian] training house. I have promised him that, perhaps one will teach some of them another perspective on the problems of the East. "

General Government

Laying of the foundation stone for a police barracks in Krakow, v. l. No. Heinrich Himmler, Hans Frank, Kurt Daluege (1939)

On October 26, 1939, Hans Frank took up his post as Governor General of the parts of Poland occupied by the Wehrmacht . The Generalgouvernement was formed after the division of territory within the framework of the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty and was referred to by Frank as the “neighboring country of the Reich”. It originally covered an area of ​​95,000 km² and was expanded to include Galicia in 1942 to 142,000 km². The Generalgouvernement was placed under the jurisdiction of the German Reich, but not incorporated into the national territory.

The Wawel , Frank's residence in Krakow (2005)
Frank's private residence "Haus Kressendorf"

Frank had his official residence first in Lodz , in November 1939, he resided on the Krakow castle Wawel , the seat of the Polish kings . The party comrades soon mockingly called the Generalgouvernement "Frank-Reich", because Frank ruled Poland as a "German gentleman ", employed an army of servants whom he called "followers" and plundered art treasures from the property of the Catholic Church and the Polish nobility . He competed in it with Reichsmarschall Göring , who appointed the later SS-Oberführer Kajetan Mühlmann as "special commissioner for the collection and safeguarding of the country's art and cultural treasures". Frank's private residence, Schloss Kressendorf ( Krzeszowice ), was equally lavish and decorated with stolen furniture from Polish aristocratic palaces. Goebbels noted: "Frank does not rule, he rules" and described him in his diary as "half mad". Frank was art-loving and musical, he played the piano , was an opera lover , chess player , Nietzsche connoisseur and was in contact with artists such as Gerhart Hauptmann , Winifred Wagner , Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner , who premiered it on December 2, 1944 under Hans Swarowsky in Krakow Dedicated orchestral work "Krakow Welcome".

Frank pushed for a "cultural contrast policy" with which he pursued the planned destruction of Polish cultural and intellectual life in the General Government. The University of Warsaw was closed in the first days of the occupation ; the Jagiellonian University in Cracow became a German educational institution, in which no Polish students were admitted. The majority of their Polish professors were deported to concentration camps, and some were murdered there. Even higher schools soon ceased to exist, Poland lost almost 30 percent of all academics and teachers in high schools. At the same time, German academics took over the “ trusteeship ” for the state's cultural and art assets in the General Government. Frank wrote on October 3, 1939:

"After that, the country is only exploited by ruthless cannibalization, the removal of all supplies, raw materials, machines, manufacturing facilities, etc. that are important for the German war economy, the use of workers in the empire, and the throttling of the entire economy of Poland to the most basic standard of living for the population absolutely necessary minimum, closure of all educational institutions, especially technical schools and universities, to prevent the offspring of a Polish intelligentsia . "

As the head of the administration and directly subordinate to Hitler, Frank was jointly responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, for the confiscation of their property and the deportation of around a million Polish forced laborers to German factories, and for the deportation of Polish Jews to ghettos. In a speech to employees on November 25, 1939, he openly described it as “a pleasure to finally be able to physically tackle the Jewish race. The more people die, the better. ”Regarding the supply of the Polish population during the war winter , he remarked laconically:“ The winter will be a hard winter here. If there is no bread for Poland, one should not come with complaints. ”By means of the implementing ordinances issued by Frank, the entire state, private and church art property in Poland was confiscated within six months. Polish lawyers, doctors, priests, teachers, artists and scientists were shot as so-called “hostages”, and Jewish actors, writers, journalists and painters were abducted to ghettos. In the summer of 1940, more than 7,000 possible political opponents and resistance fighters as well as convicted criminals and imprisoned Poles, but also intellectuals, were liquidated in the course of the " AB-Aktion " (Extraordinary Pacification Action) . Frank justified their summary judgment with the words: "The aim of the work in the Generalgouvernement is not the establishment of a constitutional state , but the fulfillment of the National Socialist Eastern task." (Compare General Plan Ost ) Since this action, Frank has been called the "butcher of Poland" by the Polish citizens. designated.

Four extermination camps for the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” were set up in Frank's sphere of influence on the territory of the General Government : Belzec , Sobibor , Treblinka and Majdanek . With the implementation of the action Reinhardt commissioned Heinrich Himmler the Lublin SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik .

On December 16, 1941, Frank gave a speech at a government meeting in the presence of Bühler, the heads of office of the governors and the SS and police leaders:

“One way or another, we have to put an end to the Jews - I want to tell you this quite frankly. [...] But what should happen to the Jews? [...] We were told in Berlin: why are you making this trouble; we can't do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat, liquidate them yourself! Gentlemen, I must ask you to arm yourself against all considerations of pity. We have to destroy the Jews wherever we meet them and wherever possible [...] "

In the summer of 1942, Frank gave four speeches at the universities of Berlin , Vienna , Munich and Heidelberg on the subject of “The law as the basis of the national community” and which are regarded as a reply to Hitler's Reichstag speech of April 1942, in the course of which Hitler spoke out A blanket power of attorney as the "supreme court lord" had been granted, which in practice meant the elimination of the formally still existing judicial independence. Frank defended the legal system against attacks from SS circles and took under the motto: “No Reich without law - not even ours! No Reich without a judge - not even the German one! No judge without real power from above - not even the German! ”Opposition to the total disempowerment of the judiciary by the police. Hitler thereupon banned Frank from speaking outside the Generalgouvernement and banned him from all offices in the Reich. This meant the end of Frank's legal political activities. Hitler rejected two of Frank's resignation from the post of governor general.

At Frank's “suggestion”, i. H. At the instigation and with the personal and official support of the Governor General, the volume Das Generalgouvernement appeared in 1943 in the series of Baedeker's travel manuals . As could be read in the editor's foreword, it should be a handbook "that gives an idea of ​​the scope of the orderly and constructive work that has already been accomplished or started under difficult war conditions in 3 1/2 years since German Reich has taken over the administration of the Vistula area. "

With Hitler's authorization to the highest Reich authorities to issue orders for the Generalgouvernement, SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich also received rights to intervene in the affairs of the Generalgouvernement and de facto achieved sole responsibility through their executive organs. The extermination operation Aktion Reinhardt ran from July 1942 to October 1943 via this command line (see also Aktion Erntefest ). Frank fought a power struggle with Himmler, who ruled in a kind of "secondary government" and wanted to submit occupied Poland to the police force of the SS under Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , the State Secretary for Security Issues in Poland. Frank was supported in this controversy by Hitler until the end, although he had a pronounced hostility and disdain for the judiciary and its representatives and Frank was severely hostile within the NSDAP. Albert Speer described him as an "idiot" to Hitler, Goebbels called him in his diary on September 10, 1944, "a first-class political criminal". Frank's management style was heavily criticized, especially by Himmler and Martin Bormann , who worked hard on his removal together with the head of the Reich Chancellery , Hans Heinrich Lammers .

In view of the approaching Eastern Front , Frank tried in the summer of 1944 to convince a group of Krakow intellectuals invited to the Wawel that the Polish underground should no longer fight the German troops. Rather, the Poles should become allies of the Germans in the “fight against Bolshevism ”. The "Krakauer Zeitung" published for the occupiers reported in large format about Frank's advance, which was not supported by the SS leadership and was also ignored by the Polish AK underground army .

Nuremberg Trial

The Lady with the Ermine (around 1483–1490) by Leonardo da Vinci also had Frank transported to Neuhaus

During the advance of the Red Army on Krakow, Frank fled on 17/18. January 1945 to Bavaria. On May 4, he was arrested by American soldiers in the "Bergfrieden House" in Neuhaus am Schliersee in the "Branch of the General Government of Poland" set up by him, where he had taken numerous works of art from Krakow, including works by Rembrandt , Rubens and Leonardo da Vinci . "My march with Hitler came to an end after almost a quarter of a century," he later wrote in his memoirs of that day. In the course of his arrest, Frank handed over his 11,367-page service diary in which he had meticulously cataloged his work in the Generalgouvernement and which was later to become of great importance at the Nuremberg Trial . On May 6, 1945, he attempted suicide in the prisoner-of-war camp of the 36th US Infantry Division in Berchtesgaden by cutting open his wrists after trying to cut his throat shortly after his arrest but was kept alive. In the summer of 1945 he was interned with other Nazi figures and high-ranking Wehrmacht members in Bad Mondorf in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in POW camp No. 32 ( Camp Ashcan ) and was transferred to Nuremberg in August 1945.

Because of the crimes against the civilian population committed during his tenure in the Generalgouvernement, especially in the ghettos of Lemberg , Warsaw and Litzmannstadt ( Łódź ), Frank was charged with conspiracies , war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals . In the Nuremberg prison , Frank ostentatiously turned to Catholicism and described the trial to the forensic psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert as "a God-willed world judgment that is destined to investigate and end the terrible period of suffering under Adolf Hitler". While in custody he wrote his memoirs, “In the face of the gallows. Interpretation of Hitler and his time on the basis of personal experiences and knowledge ”, published as a book in 1953; the second edition was self-published by his wife Brigitte in 1955.

In the trial of the main war criminals , Frank spoke a famous admission of guilt during the demonstration: “We have fought against Judaism for years and we have made utterances that are terrible [...] A thousand years will pass to take this guilt away from Germany . ”This statement aroused outrage among the co-defendants, especially Göring. In the closing words of August 31, 1946, however, Frank took this sentence back again: "The gigantic mass crimes of the most appalling kind that [...] were committed against Germans and are still being committed have already completely erased every possible debt of our people."

Frank was found guilty of charges on October 1, 1946, on counts 3 (war crimes) and 4 (crimes against humanity) and sentenced to death by hanging. According to the verdict he was

“A willing and knowledgeable contributor to both the use of terror in Poland and the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that starved large numbers of people; also in the deportation of more than one million Poles as slave laborers to Germany and in the execution of a program that resulted in the murder of at least three million Jews. "

Hans Frank accepted the death sentence with the words "I deserve and expect it". He also addressed the following words to the German people:

“Above all, God spoke and carried out the judgment on Hitler, about him and the system that we served in a spirit far removed from God. Therefore may our people also be called back from the path on which Hitler and we led them with him. I ask our people not to persist in this direction, not even one step. "

Shortly before his execution on October 16, 1946 in Nuremberg, Frank thanked Sixtus O'Connor for the spiritual care he had given during his imprisonment and asked God to “receive him graciously”. His son, Niklas Frank, called his turn to Catholicism and its support by the Church in David Evans' documentary What our fathers did (2015) a "smear comedy". The body was cremated a day later in the municipal crematorium in Munich's Ostfriedhof and the ashes were scattered in the Wenzbach , a tributary of the Isar .

Niklas Frank and the book "Der Vater"

Hans Frank's son Niklas Frank published a book in 1987 with the title Der Vater , subtitled “Eine Abrechnung”. Frank reconstructed his father's life on the basis of years of research, in the course of which he had to realize the immense extent of the father's crimes. The book was initially published as a series with the title "My Father, the Nazi Murderer" in the German magazine Stern and sparked heated controversy. Niklas Frank writes:

“There are fathers who create you anew every day. Just like mine I fought with him for a lifetime. Only internally. Then I exhibited, wrote a wild text, unfiltered by bourgeois taste, just as disgusting as German and Austrian citizens pursued their crimes during the 'Third Reich' or protected, supported, adored, loved Hitler and his criminals - and the great times have not forgotten until today. [...] If you follow your father, as I do when you crawl into your brain, as I do when you study your cowards and find them again, as I do when you do your research to see what kind of Gierzapfen my mother was, How she saw the Generalgouvernement of Poland as a supermarket, in which she, as 'Ms. General Governor', could determine the prices herself when, like me, they drove through the ghettos and loaded fur from the Jewish shops, the owners of which mistakenly believed, through Brigitte Frank to be able to save her life, then only one thing can emerge from all the suffering and hatred between the mountains of corpses: the grotesque. "

On June 9, 1995, Der Vater was released as a multimedia theater project with the subtitle “A bloody comedy” at the Wiener Festwochen , based on the scenario written by Niklas Frank in collaboration with the Israeli author Joshua Sobol , and directed by Paulus Manker . The original voice of Hans Frank as well as film recordings and countless private photos from Niklas Frank's possession were also used.

Niklas Frank's confrontation with his father is also presented in detail in the documentary What our Fathers did: A Nazi Legacy (2015) by David Evans.

Writings by Hans Frank

  • Private diary , Volumes 1 and 2 (unpublished), Federal Archives Koblenz.
  • In the face of the gallows. Interpretation of Hitler and his time on the basis of personal experiences and knowledge. Written in the Nuremberg judicial prison . Alfred Beck Verlag, Munich-Graefelfing 1953 (2nd edition 1955, self-published by Brigitte Frank, Neuhaus bei Schliersee).
  • Stanislaw Piotrowski: Hans Frank's diary. German Katja Weintraub . Slightly abridged German edition of the detailed edition in Polish language 1957. PWN - Polish Publishing House of Science, Warszawa 1963.
  • Werner Präg; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer Ed .: The service diary of the German Governor General in Poland 1939–1945 . DVA, Stuttgart 1975, ISBN 3-421-01700-X .
  • Imanuel Geiss ; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer Ed .: German Politics in Poland 1939–1945; from the official diary of Hans Frank, Governor General in Poland . Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1980, ISBN 3-8100-0296-8 .
  • Hans Frank was editor and author of the periodicals magazine of the Academy for German Law , German Law (central organ of the Federation of National Socialist German Jurists), working reports of the Academy for German Law , German Law in Austria and Das Vorfeld (training sheets for the National Socialists in the Generalgouvernement) and author of numerous articles in the newsletter of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and the Reich Legal Office of the NSDAP, and from 1934 publisher of the yearbook of the Academy for German Law in Munich.

literature

Non-scientific literature

Literary processing

  • Broken . Novel by Curzio Malaparte , Casella, Naples 1944; Kaputt , translated by Hellmut Ludwig, Stahlberg, Karlsruhe 1951; here: Second part: “The rats”, Chapter IV (“God shave the king”), Chapter V (“Forbidden Cities”) and Chapter VII (“Cricket in Poland”). New edition: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-552-05334-4 .

“The novel draws its enormity from the contrast between the extracts of reality. A stylish dinner in the apartments of the Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, is bathed in a brilliant light by the description of a pogrom in Jassy, ​​which the hero and first-person narrator portrays while roasting goose and looks like a journey into hell. [...] You never forget the moist, soft physiognomy of the Governor General Frank. "

- Frankfurter Rundschau, April 6, 2005)

Web links

Commons : Hans Frank  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Schenk, Hans Frank: Hitler's Crown Lawyer and Governor General , Frankfurt am Main, 2006, p. 236: "Hans Frank, whom the victims called 'butcher of Poland'"; Garry O'Connor, The Butcher of Poland: Hitler's Lawyer Hans Frank , The History Press , Stroud, 2013
  2. ^ John Michael Steiner: Power Politics and Social Change in National Socialist Germany: A Process of Escalation Into Mass Destruction . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1976, ISBN 90-279-7651-1 , p. 466 .
  3. ↑ Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer: Hans Michael Frank. 2013, accessed on November 7, 2017 (German).
  4. ↑ a b Hans Frank: Curriculum vitae, in: Excerpt from the dissertation The legal entity under public law , the typewritten dissertation to obtain the title of Doctor of Laws of the High Law and Political Science Faculty of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Speaker: Dr. Walter Jellinek, added. Identification of the dissertation: http://d-nb.info/570188911 .
  5. ^ Susanne Adlberger: Wilhelm Kisch - Life and Work (1874–1952). From the Kaiser Wilhelms University of Strasbourg to the National Socialist Academy for German Law, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007, p. 156.
  6. ^ Schulz, Gerhard, “Frank, Hans” in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 5 (1961), p. 341 [online version]; URL: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118534742.html#ndbcontent
  7. ↑ Aphabetisches list of the members of the Reichstag with personal information. In: Reichstag Handbook , 6th electoral period, Berlin, 1932, p. 76.
  8. ↑ Hans Frank: In the face of the gallows. Interpretation of Hitler and his time on the basis of personal experiences and knowledge. Written in the Nuremberg judicial prison . P. 331; quoted from: Schenk 2006, p. 65.
  9. ^ Cf. Werner Maser : Adolf Hitler. Legend-Myth-Reality . Munich / Esslingen 1971, pp. 25-28.
  10. ↑ Hans-Günther Seraphim : The political diary of Alfred Rosenberg . 1934/35 and 1939/40. Göttingen / Berlin / Frankfurt 1956, p. 98.
  11. ↑ At Frank's instigation, Friedrichfranz Stampe (1897–1959), previously a theater director in Hagen, became director of the German Theater , which was then renamed the State Theater of the Generalgouvernement . At the theater was u. a. also in 1943 Pfitzner's Das Christ-Elflein performed.
  12. ^ Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, p. 5.240.
  13. ↑ Gabriele Lesser: Life as if: the Krakow Underground University in World War II. Cologne 1988, pp. 4-10.
  14. ↑ Willi Dreßen , Volker Riess: Exploitation and Destruction. Health policy in the General Government. In: Norbert Frei (Ed.) Medicine and Health Policy in the Nazi Era. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1991 (= writings of the quarterly books for contemporary history. Special issue), ISBN 3-486-64534-X , p. 157–171, here: p. 157 f.
  15. ↑ a b Michael Wildt : History of National Socialism. Göttingen 2008, p. 150.
  16. ↑ Werner Präg (Ed.): The service diary of the German Governor General in Poland 1939–1945 . Stuttgart 1975, ISBN 3-421-01700-X , p. 457.
  17. ↑ Cf. Das Generalgouvernement. Karl Baedeker's travel guide. With 3 maps and 6 city maps . Leipzig, Karl Baedeker 1943, SV
  18. ^ Bridge between the German leadership and the Polish people, in: Krakauer Zeitung, July 27, 1944, p. 6.
  19. ^ A b Reinhold Friedrich: Traces of National Socialism in the Bavarian Oberland. Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-1458-0 , pp. 178ff.
  20. ↑ Thomas Darnstädt : A stroke of luck in history . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 2005, pp. 128 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Frank, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frank, Hans Michael (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR and war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1946
Place of death Nuremberg