Letter to a Nazi father: 'I look at his photo on the gallows to make sure he is well dead'

Idafe Martin

09/02/2021 11:50

• Clarín.com

• World

Updated 09/02/2021 11:51

"The Father, a

Revenge

" (

The Father, a revenge, in English

), a work by the German journalist

Niklas Frank

, is a publishing phenomenon in Germany.

Because Frank, a common surname in German, is the son of

Hans Frank

, a senior official in the Nazi regime and military governor of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Frank had

absolute power

in Poland until early 1945 Soviet troops entered Poland from the east and he had to flee.

On May 3 of that same year, he was arrested in Germany by

American soldiers.

A tough among tough, Hans Frank was tried by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg trials, found guilty

of war crimes and crimes against humanity,

and sentenced to death.

He was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Nazi hierarchs during the Nuremberg trials.

Photo: AFP file.

Frank had been a Nazi since the beginning of the movement led by Adolf Hitler.

In 1919, after the First World War and at the age of 19, he joined the German Workers 'Party (DAP), the origin of

the National Socialist German Workers' Party

(NSDAP), the official name of the Nazi party.

In 1930 he was already elected deputy.

He was head of the Nazi Bar Association and approved, as minister,

massacres

like the first to occur in the Dachau camp.

A charge against his father

The book is quite

a depth charge against his father

.

Frank says that every day he looks at the full-body photo of his hanged father "to remember and to be sure that he

is quite dead

."

"The father, a reckoning" (The Father, a revenge, in English), a work by the German journalist Niklas Frank.

Photo: waterstones.com

His father, Hans Frank, was held responsible for the murder of

almost four million Poles

(most of them Jews) because one of his main tasks was to

ensure their deportation

to death camps.

Hans Frank was

gauleiter

(district chief), a position that in practice meant being Hitler's plenipotentiary representative in Poland.

Frank

never accepted responsibility for his crimes

, not even before the gallows.

Niklas Frank's attitude is not the most common.

People like Edda Goering always refused to condemn the crimes of their parents.

Not Niklas Frank

.

After years of working for the weekly 'Stern', he decided to write a work that is openly a charge against his father.

Hermann Goering (standing) during the Nuremberg trials.

Photo: AP

Niklas Frank does not remember World War II (he was born in 1939 and

was 6 years old

when Nazi Germany was defeated).

Today, at the age of 82, he publishes a work for which he spent years studying the

abundant correspondence

and diaries that the family kept from his father, who before being military governor of Poland was a jurist who was a lover of Renaissance art and a friend of the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

A coward and a liar

Niklas Frank does not follow the attitude of his family.

While his brothers and sisters have never condemned his father, his book says that his father was a man

drunk with pride

, obsessed with his political career,

a coward and a liar.

He also criticizes his mother, whom he assures that he was above all

concerned with amassing money

.

Niklas last saw his father when he was seven years old, shortly before he was hanged.

He says that during his research he

looked for "at least one good deed

, a sign of something, a sign of a little flower somewhere in his existence, but I didn't find anything."

His father, for Niklas Frank, was

an ogre

, the same man who ruled Poland by fire and blood under Hitler.

Remember that since childhood "I had the conviction of belonging to

a family of criminals

."

Brussels, special

ap

Look also

How Two Jewish Sisters Created a Cultural Oasis Hidden from the Nazis

He saved three little brothers from the Nazis during World War II, and meets them again 70 years later